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Inventors of Unix Win Japan Prize
jbrodkin writes "The inventors of Unix and the C programming language, one of whom also created the first master-level chess-playing machine, have been awarded the prestigious Japan Prize for their work in building the Unix operating system in 1969. Ken Thompson, who is now a distinguished engineer at Google, and Dennis Ritchie, who is retired, were researchers at Bell Labs four decades ago when they 'developed the Unix operating system which has significantly advanced computer software, hardware and networks over the past four decades, and facilitated the realization of the Internet,' the Japan Prize Foundation said Tuesday in awarding them the 2011 prize. The pair join previous winners such as Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee. In addition to developing Unix, Thompson also played a key role in building Belle, the first chess-playing computer to achieve a master-level rating and five-time winner of the now-defunct North American Computer Chess Championship in the 1970s and 1980s. Ritchie and Thompson have also been credited with developing the C programming language, a process that occurred in conjunction with the development of Unix."
You apparently never used Unix during the 70s and 80s. Unix "security" was a constant joke at least until the mid 90s.
Here is the actual Al Gore quote:
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country's economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
Clumsy and self serving wording, yes. Claims to have invented the Internet? No, not at all. He was just saying that his policies helped create the Internet as we know it today, which is somewhat true. What he REALLY did was cosponsor the Information Infrastructure and Technology Act of 1992 which opened the Internet to commercial traffic.
So, we can really thank Gore for pop-up ads and spam, not the whole Internet.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
OSX is unix with an aqua graphical user interface/theme.
Android is becoming more open with each update. If you look at some of Gingerbread's new features, they allow for more developers to code the way they want to, specifically you can now write a Android application completely in C and C++. The NDK has become much more evolved and allows for greater access to Google's Android. Chris Pruett has a great article on what Google has done with this latest update, particularly with the NDK. http://android-developers.blogspot.com/2011/01/gingerbread-ndk-awesomeness.html