The technology world lost 2 major legends this October. One was covered a lot more in the news than the other and understandably so. But their contributions were equally great and impactful, but in different ways. I am talking about Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie. Steve Jobs was of course the well-known celebrity among the 2. As a co-founder and CEO of Apple, he has helped introduce products that have completely changed the way we live. He was one of the major contributors to the PC (personal computer) revolution in the 80’s and recently, every product Apple launched has been a huge commercial success and has impacted us in significant ways. The iPod changed the way we listen to music, the iPhone changed the way we use our phones and the iPad has introduced tablets into our lives. Actually, iPhone and the iPad have launched the entire smart-phone and tablet industry respectively. 

Apple and Steve Jobs did not invent the MP3 player or the smart-phone or the tablet. Jobs does deserve a lot more mention when it comes to inventing the PC, but even there, there are many people and companies including IBM that claim they invented the PC. But Jobs and Apple do deserve all the credit for launching the best products in each of those segments and popularizing them to the point that the average person can’t live without those gadgets today. He helped launch the first commercially successful PC, though he eventually got pushed out of Apple in the mid 80’s after Apple started having some problems. What he did when he came back to Apple was even more impressive. He completely re-invented the company behind a new set of products like the iPod and iPhone while also reviving their PC and laptop business. It was cool to own a Apple PC again.

Steve Jobs was more of an innovator than an inventor. I might be splitting hair here, but it’s important to make this distinction because some of his fans are getting carried away in comparing him to greats like Einstein. Jobs did not invent many path-breaking products or concepts, but he made them better and hence more popular and commercially viable and successful. He was also a great businessman. He understood usability better than anybody else and repeatedly introduced products that both 8 year-old kids and their 70 year-old grandmothers found easy to use. And if you were technically savvy, you could go “under the hood” and do a lot of complicated things as well. This made apple products a hit with both the techies and the non-techies. Jobs seemed to have his fingers on the human psychology behind looking and feeling good. His products consistently gave people a sense of being cool and special when they held them in their hands and were definitely perceived as some of life’s useful luxuries. Apple’s pricing played into this as well and he built a uniquely successful brand.

As a producer of extremely popular consumer products, Jobs had a direct impact on us and his death obviously touched many people across the world.

Dennis Ritchie, on the other hand was not a commercially successful businessman or an inventor of consumer products that people cared about. But Ritchie was one of the icons of the computer software industry and without him, technology around us might look significantly different and may be even inferior. Ritchie was a true computer scientist who created the C programming language and was a co-creator of the UNIX operating system. UNIX and C are the fundamental building blocks on which the entire digital and computer revolution of the last 30 years have been based on. We don’t interact directly with UNIX and C as often as we used to because software technology has grown and evolved to enable higher and more useful levels of abstractions for both the software developer and the end-user. But underneath it all, you will still find UNIX and C powering your website or that smartphone you love. Even Apple’s software today that you see and touch on your iPads and iPhones is built on some version of UNIX and C underneath. So Dennis Ritchie’s work is buried and alive several layers below that Facebook app you use everyday on your iPhone or Droid.

If you are a software engineer or if you have ever taken a C programming class, you probably know what K&R stands for. Those are the initials of the authors used as a short form to represent the most authoritative book on the C language written by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie. We have all read that book, struggled with the questions and puzzles and tried our best to write C programs that would even remotely resemble the elegant solutions that Ritchie himself could come up with. It was not too difficult to solve some of those programming problems, but the idea was to solve them in the most efficient and intuitive way that would make Ritchie proud. How often do you see a book with a corresponding answer book and I remember owning both the K&R and its answer book when I was learning to program. People in software probably appreciate the impact of Ritchie, but it’s worth pointing out to the rest that we lost a true legend when he passed away. Both Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie have left indelible marks on our lives through their work and we should be thankful that our lives overlapped with theirs. They may have left our world, but they will continue to influence our lives for the foreseeable future. R.I.P Steve Jobs. R.I.P Dennis Ritchie. We will miss you both.