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’.

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