A while ago, a friend of mine was going on an expedition to Peru and didn’t want to run the risk of his iPod loosing power. His cunning solution was to take the solar panels out of all the calculators he could find in order to build a solar charger to attach to the top of his rucksack. For a while, this wasn’t an issue until the battery in the calculator ran out and had no way of recharging. Something had to be done, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.
When the battery was replaced, it was clear the back would never fit on again, but calculator casing is over-rated anyway. As is the orientation and presence of all its buttons.
Steve Jobs did great things to the computing industry and was responsible for some of the nicest devices available. His death in October filled the media and respects were paid by many loyal Apple fans. Seven days later, however, came the death of another man, whose works were in my opinion far more important to the field of computing, and on whose ingenuity Apple’s success (along with that of so many other technology firms) relied. Dennis Ritchie invented the ‘C’ programming language: what is probably the most famous and most widely used language in existence. In fact there are almost no computer architectures in existence for which a C compiler has not been created. Not only was he responsible for the most successful programming language, he also co-invented the UNIX operating system (upon which Apple’s operating systems are incidentally based). Little was said in the media about the death of this man, but the result of his genius can be found in far more abundance than that of Steve Jobs’.
