UNIX Creators To Receive Pender Award

jellings writes "Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson will be recipients of this years' Harold Pender Award, given "to an outstanding member of the engineering profession who has achieved distinction by significant contributions to society" by the University Of Pennsylvania School of Engineering. Under the direction of Pender, ENIAC was born, and under Ritchie and Thompson, UNIX was born."

Comments

I would expect...

[Creepy Crawler]

Torvalds, Cox, and Stallman get that similar award.

After all, the free software was pushed by Torvalds and Cox by providing a free Nix under the gpl that pushes software in an open way.

And of course, Stallman, for writing Gnu C. No other FOSS comiler existed for C until he made it. And it was used in many unixes, NExT, Linux, *BSD, MacOS 10, and Linux with compilers also for WIndows. I'd say he would qualify for it too.

Re:I would expect...

[anomalous cohort]

I see your point. Ritchie and Thompson made significant contributions to the Society of Engineering and to telcos but not to general Society (unless you want to count all those telephone switches that ran off of some variation of Unix). It was Torvalds, et. al, that brought Unix to the masses.

I remember buying Microport Unix for the PC back in the late 80's for $1000. There certainly wasn't going to be a lot of wide adoption at that price.

Re:Only now?

[xenocide2]

Probably because the lingering ghosts of Operating Systems past have left the public eye. UNIX wasn't always considered the big-iron behemoth it is today. There was a time when people percieved UNIX in the same way the typical slashdotter views MS Windows today. "The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++."

The legends of UNIX hold that original version was put together hastily (the filesystem was designed overnight), and for the express purposes of playing spacewar. How much of that is true and how much comes from lying MUTLICS sympathists, I'll never know. But only with time has UNIX become something worthwhile. Perhaps the award is for being the first decent example of an iterative development cycle?