[Info-vax] RIP: Dennis Ritchie (UNIX / C)

[Neil Rieck]

On Oct 22, 10:46 am, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Oct 17, 12:52 pm, Neil Rieck <n.ri... at sympatico.ca> wrote:
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> > On Oct 16, 4:32 pm, John Wallace <johnwalla... at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
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> > > On Oct 14, 2:43 am, "Forster, Michael" <mfors... at mcw.edu> wrote:
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> > > > A story from AP:
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> > > > DennisRitchie, computer-programming pioneer, dies<http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_16036/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=CNLtbdwb>
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> > > Turning the pages of the hardcopy (Manchester) Guardian earlier today,
> > > I was very pleasantly surprised (well, as pleasant as you can be in
> > > the circumstances) to see that dmr was the lead obit, the whole
> > > section to himself, and got a really quite good writeup.
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> > > It's athttp://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/oct/13/dennis-ritchie
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> > > In looking for what else the writer (Martin Campbell-Kelly, not a name
> > > I recognise) had done for the Grauniad, he's done quite a few obits,
> > > also recently including one for Daniel (D) McCracken. That's another
> > > author whose books will be familiar to many of a certain age. I'd not
> > > seen it reported elsewhere.
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> > >http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/aug/29/daniel-mccracken-obi...
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> > > I assume the Martin Campbell-Kelly in this picture is the one who is
> > > Professor of Computer Science at Warwick University:http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/dcs/people/martin_campbell-kelly/
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> > > Thank you, Professor Campbell-Kelly, for making bad news marginally
> > > more bearable.
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> > Thank god for the Guardian (as well as "BBC Television on PBS" and
> > "BBC World Service on Sirius"). Most news outlets in Canada and the US
> > seem to preferentially carry Hollywood super-star minutia and it seems
> > to me that their coverage of Steve Jobs was more of the super-star
> > stuff. And while I'm on my soap box, why do newspapers still carry a
> > daily astrology blurb instead of a daily astronomy blurb?
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> > NSR
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> There was coverage of Dennis Ritchie in this week's BBC Radio 4
> obituary programme, "Last Word" (as mentioned earlier). I only caught
> the tail end (wasted too much time faffing about with a new-to-me
> alleged DAB receiver). Tim Berners-Lee was one of (I presume) several
> folks speaking. You can find the obit online via BBC Listen Again athttp://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00l9xhw
> and I will do so in due course.
>
> Whether or not you like the language, the book was a classic.
> Stroustrup's book, on the other hand...

Hey, thanks for this. What a treat.

BTW, many of the people at the Waterloo IEEE Computer group have
convinced me that without UNIX/C

1) we would still have an Internet
2) we might not have TCP/IP
3) we would not have the world-wide-web (browsers would be as buggy as
UNIX was before C was used to clean it up)

Whether you agree with these three points or not, having the DOD get
Internet stacks into the hands of students who usually worked on some
flavor of UNIX helped to spread it. On a related note I just learned
that Bill Joy was responsible for developing TCP/IP for UNIX on VAX.
Check out this link and quote:

http://www.historyofcomputercommunications.info/Book/9/9.8_TCP-IP-XNS81-83.html

Quote: The intended cut over date for Arpanet, the most important
network of the day, was January 1, 1983, years away. The project
timeline was not without perils. First, BBN had to make Arpanet’s
Subnet TCP/IP-compatible. Then came the complicated issue of creating
host TCP/IP code for all the essential computers connected to Arpanet.
There was no desire to let each host site create its own version of
TCP/IP, a painful lesson learned in creating the original host
software now to be replaced. In 1981, DARPA awarded seven contracts to
create computer host code. The contract to port TCP/IP to UNIX went to
BBN. (See Exhibit 9.5 TCP/IP Ports) BBN would then give its TCP/IP
code to Bill Joy at Berkeley to integrate into the upgraded version of
UNIX Joy was developing for the VAX computer. Creating host ports
began once Postel posted the TCP/IP standard as RFCs 791 and 702 in
September 1981.


Neil Rieck
Kitchener / Waterloo / Cambridge,
Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/