Dennis Ritchie Rest in Peace
closed account (1vRz3TCk)
| helios wrote: |
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| Different fields? Did Jobs ever even touched a computer professionally other than to sell it? |
Yes and yes.
Dennis Ritchie, his field was a computer science. Steve Jobs was an inventor/entrepreneur. They don't come close enough to compare achievements.
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What exactly did he invent? The Apple I and II, for instance, were Wozniak's designs.
closed account (1vRz3TCk)
| Wikipedia wrote: |
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| As of October 9, 2011, Jobs is listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 342 United States patents or patent applications related to a range of technologies from actual computer and portable devices to user interfaces (including touch-based), speakers, keyboards, power adapters, staircases, clasps, sleeves, lanyards and packages. |
I didn't know about that.
I refuse to believe that it is possible to patent lanyard designs.
| CodeMonkey wrote: |
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| lanyards |
I refuse to believe that it is possible to patent lanyard designs.
| I refuse to believe that it is possible to patent lanyard designs. |
http://www.macnn.com/blogs/2007/03/08/apple-files-advanced-ipodiphone-lanyard-patent.html
http://gizmodo.com/238898/apple-succeeds-in-patenting-the--lanyard
closed account (LzqpfSEw)
Dennis Ritchie - Lead Unix developer, author of C.
Mac OS - Unix based operating written in C.
Dennis deserves more credit than Jobs.
It's a shame all the uneducated hipsters believe Jobs is 'the founding father of modern computing'.
Mac OS - Unix based operating written in C.
Dennis deserves more credit than Jobs.
It's a shame all the uneducated hipsters believe Jobs is 'the founding father of modern computing'.
| ...all the uneducated hipsters believe Jobs is 'the founding father of modern computing'. |
Erm... I don't think any statistically significant group of individuals believes that. Does anyone?
-Albatross
closed account (LzqpfSEw)
Albatross, I was talking to several people at my school (about Jobs' death) both teachers and students, I can guarantee that every single one of them believed he did more for computing than anybody else.
When Dennis Ritchie died? Nobody had even heard of him.
When Dennis Ritchie died? Nobody had even heard of him.
Ah. Okay.
My my. That's a real pity. I don't remember the Macintosh platform doing too well until they made it UNIX-compliant. I also believe that its primary API uses a C derivative as its main language. Finally, I don't recall Apple giving Dennis any tokens of appreciation for his work which inevitably helped Apple a lot. That is, him or the CSRG of UC Berkley, which wrote the original BSD (Darwin, Macintosh OS X's kernel, is a BSD derivative). ;_;
Anyways. Rest in C, Ritchie.
-Albatross
My my. That's a real pity. I don't remember the Macintosh platform doing too well until they made it UNIX-compliant. I also believe that its primary API uses a C derivative as its main language. Finally, I don't recall Apple giving Dennis any tokens of appreciation for his work which inevitably helped Apple a lot. That is, him or the CSRG of UC Berkley, which wrote the original BSD (Darwin, Macintosh OS X's kernel, is a BSD derivative). ;_;
Anyways. Rest in C, Ritchie.
-Albatross
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closed account (1vRz3TCk)
| Albatros wrote: |
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| Darwin, Macintosh OS X's kernel, is a BSD derivative |
Speaking of kernels, at some point in my life I would really like to program one. I was thinking my next long term project to tackle would be designing and programming an 8 or 16 bit single-tasking kernel. I attempted this before, but I quit early on due to my lack of assembly knowledge...among other things :P
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I've been writing a 32-bit protected mode kernel (it's difficult but I think I'm getting the hang of it). I don't see the point in bothering with real mode any more unless you want to write a bootloader...
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closed account (1vRz3TCk)
I plan on starting work on an OS when the Raspberry Pi[1] is launched.
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/
[1] http://www.raspberrypi.org/
I'd rather not write a bootloader, and to be honest 32bit makes more sense for me. I'm not exactly sure why I thought 8 or 16 bit would be easier to work with as a whole.
Well protected mode was created purely to address the problems with real mode, the main one being the lack of memory protection, and also that it's generally convoluted, incompatible and difficult to work with - BIOSes are usually full of bugs, you can't be certain that all BIOSes support all functions (even the ones they're supposed to support), you only get 1 MiB of RAM1, etc.
Protected mode is easier because you can take a bootloader like GRUB which will set everything up for you. Then all you absolutely have to do is set up your own interrupt system, optionally set up paging, and that's pretty much it (not to imply that doing so is at all easy - it's not) unless you want your kernel to actually do something (then you need to write drivers, a scheduler, etc.).
64-bit "long mode" is better (uses a flat memory model, more registers, etc.) but you have to jump through hoops (namely, setting up protected mode first, meaning you essentially have to write two kernels, or add an extra stage to your bootloader if you wrote your own) to get to it.
1 Unless you enable "unreal mode", which involves jumping to protected mode, enabling A20, and then going back to real mode, allowing you to address 4 GiB of memory
Protected mode is easier because you can take a bootloader like GRUB which will set everything up for you. Then all you absolutely have to do is set up your own interrupt system, optionally set up paging, and that's pretty much it (not to imply that doing so is at all easy - it's not) unless you want your kernel to actually do something (then you need to write drivers, a scheduler, etc.).
64-bit "long mode" is better (uses a flat memory model, more registers, etc.) but you have to jump through hoops (namely, setting up protected mode first, meaning you essentially have to write two kernels, or add an extra stage to your bootloader if you wrote your own) to get to it.
1 Unless you enable "unreal mode", which involves jumping to protected mode, enabling A20, and then going back to real mode, allowing you to address 4 GiB of memory
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| It's a shame all the uneducated hipsters believe Jobs is 'the founding father of modern computing'. |
Well, there is SOME truth to this. Steve Jobs was certainly a visionary, and a very talented individual. And I know that at least at my school, 90% of my class use Apple products. There simple and elegant (though I am not personally a fan of Macbooks), and he helped to push computing from the hacker culture "geek thing" to the point where almost everyone has a computer because everyone can use one. And while I don't like Macbooks, iPods are fantastic :D Not to mention he pioneered the invention of GUI's and such with the first Apple products. Nonetheless, I still disagree with the closed-source and proprietary nature of their software, as well as their outrageous prices for computers with mediocre hardware. I understand that they're running a business, but I'm more of the open-source type.
As for Dennis Ritchie, words cannot describe my respect for the man. I'm working through the C Programming Language as I speak, and it's a fantastically written book of an even more fantastic language. If anyone truly deserves to be called "the father of modern computing," and at the very least "the father of modern operating systems," he deserves it. You'll be missed.
As for a Kernel... always wanted, but I haven't had a chance yet :(
| Not to mention he pioneered the invention of GUI's and such with the first Apple products. |
| he helped to push computing from the hacker culture "geek thing" to the point where almost everyone has a computer |
| someone reverse engineered IBM's BIOS |
And they did it in a pretty ingenious way, if you ask me.
closed account (1vRz3TCk)
The title "The father of modern computing" has to go to Alan Turing.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Turing
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| helios wrote: |
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| The fact that more than 10% of the world has access to PCs is only because someone reverse engineered IBM's BIOS. |
I don't even think they needed to reverse engineer it (the bios) - I seem to remember having an IBM PC manual waaay back in 1990 and it came with a full printout of the bios code.