A true, humble, giant has fallen

[Garp]

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/dennis-ritchie-the-giant-whose-shoulders-we-stand-on.ars?comments=1#comments-bar

This is a bad month for the tech sector so far..

It's impossible to overstate just how significant his work was. Everything you do, almost every OS you've used, has at its underpinnings the work carried out by this man. The operating system he designed with Thompson (UNIX) laid the groundwork for Linux,*BSD, NeXT, OS X and other derivatives.

The C programming language he created underpins every aspect of computing these days, and almost every modern language's compiler is written in C.

More importantly, to me, his contributions are special because they were not commercial in any way. With the use they got he, like Sir Tim Berners Lee, could have become the one of the richest men on earth from even a trivial royalty fee, but he selflessly provided us with the giant's shoulders to stand on.

[Del Lardo]

Beat you to it by one minute ;)

I'll let a passing mod work out what is the more suitable location and merge the two.

[Mark]

He's the equivalent of Rear Adm. Grace Murry Hopper where I work, so you can bet this went around our office in a hurry.

I also can't overstate the impact. Steve Jobs may have rescued Apple, but without Ritchie's work, there may well not have been an iOS, or an OS X, though it would be disrespectful to the other greats of the era to suggest that nothing else of equivalent merit would have emerged.