I'm not sure if this server can handle a/.ing or not, but here is the article in full:
Dennis Ritchie invented C and was one of the key members of the team behind Unix--two developments that underpin much modern software
DIRECTLY west from the southernmost tip of Manhattan, a bit more than 15 miles away, lies the sleepy-looking suburban town of Murray Hill. Just south of the town's centre lies a huge complex of buildings which, despite its size, looks fairly unprepossessing, boring as only business parks in the suburbs can be. But a surprising portion of what passes for modern technology can be traced back to this site, the home of Bell Laboratories, now the research arm of Lucent, but previously that of AT&T, a big American telecoms firm. It was at the Labs, as they are known colloquially, that the transistor was invented in 1947, making possible solid-state computing and paving the way for the microchip.
But the Labs were not only the birthplace, in this sense, of modern computer hardware. Much of modern software--computer programs and the special programming languages in which they are written--originated there too. Two instances in particular stand out: the programming language called C, which from the early 1970s has been perhaps the most popular programming language; and the Unix operating system, first booted up in 1971, and still going strong in everything from laptops to airline-reservation systems. Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.
However, both projects were, in fact, intensely collaborative. Dr Thompson had written C's immediate predecessor, a language known (logically enough) as B. And though Dr Thompson was the first person to work on Unix, Dr Ritchie and others, including Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike and Doug McIlroy (who headed the research group), were fundamental to its development. Dr Ritchie is the last of this group to remain at the Labs--at 62 he retains an aura of youthful enthusiasm. While others have departed for academia or newer companies, he is now the head of systems software research at Bell Labs, and is continuing his research into operating systems and languages.
Dr Ritchie likes to emphasise that he was just one member of a group. With characteristic modesty, he suggests that many of the improvements he introduced when developing C simply "looked like a good thing to do". Anyone else in the same place at the same time, he implies, would have done the same thing. But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C, disagrees. "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn," he says.
All the key participants recall the genesis of Unix and C, and the environment at Bell Labs, as something of an idyll. As Dr Kernighan says, "it was a remarkable collection of really outstanding people who were pretty well paid to do whatever they wanted, and most of them had really good taste about what to work on." Dr McIlroy later wrote that "so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations." Unix was not even given a name for more than a year after it was first invented. So much of what they did was done, initially, for themselves alone, sometimes for sheer amusement, and yet it has had a lasting legacy in the world outside. How did this happen, and what lessons follow for today's programmers?
There we were, all in one place
To answer this question, it is necessary, though difficult, to recall just how comparatively primitive the state of computing was 30 years ago. The first version of Unix was written by Dr Thompson for the PDP-7, a computer made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which cost a mere $72,000, and came with eight kilobytes of memory, and a hard disk a bit smaller than a megabyte. By contrast, a desktop computer today typically costs a hundred times less, has roughly 64,000 times as much memor
Could this stop free mailing lists? If the sender has to pay (even if it is 10cents) to send the email to a whole list of people who have requested it (like, 10000 people on a mailing list for a joke site) will they still send them, at the risk of loosing a lot of money? And besides, they won't really want to be putting possible thousands on the line for a free service.
Slashdot Mirror
I know... whoops :S
I'm not sure if this server can handle a /.ing or not, but here is the article in full:
Dennis Ritchie invented C and was one of the key members of the team behind Unix--two developments that underpin much modern software
DIRECTLY west from the southernmost tip of Manhattan, a bit more than 15 miles away, lies the sleepy-looking suburban town of Murray Hill. Just south of the town's centre lies a huge complex of buildings which, despite its size, looks fairly unprepossessing, boring as only business parks in the suburbs can be. But a surprising portion of what passes for modern technology can be traced back to this site, the home of Bell Laboratories, now the research arm of Lucent, but previously that of AT&T, a big American telecoms firm. It was at the Labs, as they are known colloquially, that the transistor was invented in 1947, making possible solid-state computing and paving the way for the microchip.
But the Labs were not only the birthplace, in this sense, of modern computer hardware. Much of modern software--computer programs and the special programming languages in which they are written--originated there too. Two instances in particular stand out: the programming language called C, which from the early 1970s has been perhaps the most popular programming language; and the Unix operating system, first booted up in 1971, and still going strong in everything from laptops to airline-reservation systems. Dennis Ritchie, who has worked at the Labs since 1967, was central to both projects. He is revered as the inventor of C, and, with Ken Thompson, as the co-inventor of Unix.
However, both projects were, in fact, intensely collaborative. Dr Thompson had written C's immediate predecessor, a language known (logically enough) as B. And though Dr Thompson was the first person to work on Unix, Dr Ritchie and others, including Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike and Doug McIlroy (who headed the research group), were fundamental to its development. Dr Ritchie is the last of this group to remain at the Labs--at 62 he retains an aura of youthful enthusiasm. While others have departed for academia or newer companies, he is now the head of systems software research at Bell Labs, and is continuing his research into operating systems and languages.
Dr Ritchie likes to emphasise that he was just one member of a group. With characteristic modesty, he suggests that many of the improvements he introduced when developing C simply "looked like a good thing to do". Anyone else in the same place at the same time, he implies, would have done the same thing. But Bjarne Stroustrup, who came to the Labs later and designed C++, a further improved version of C, disagrees. "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn," he says.
All the key participants recall the genesis of Unix and C, and the environment at Bell Labs, as something of an idyll. As Dr Kernighan says, "it was a remarkable collection of really outstanding people who were pretty well paid to do whatever they wanted, and most of them had really good taste about what to work on." Dr McIlroy later wrote that "so many good things were happening that nobody needed to be proprietary about innovations." Unix was not even given a name for more than a year after it was first invented. So much of what they did was done, initially, for themselves alone, sometimes for sheer amusement, and yet it has had a lasting legacy in the world outside. How did this happen, and what lessons follow for today's programmers?
There we were, all in one place
To answer this question, it is necessary, though difficult, to recall just how comparatively primitive the state of computing was 30 years ago. The first version of Unix was written by Dr Thompson for the PDP-7, a computer made by the Digital Equipment Corporation, which cost a mere $72,000, and came with eight kilobytes of memory, and a hard disk a bit smaller than a megabyte. By contrast, a desktop computer today typically costs a hundred times less, has roughly 64,000 times as much memor
you insensitive clod...
Wouldn't it be better if the main thing contained a link to the English part of the site rather than the German? http://www.iosono-sound.com/eng/index.html
Could this stop free mailing lists? If the sender has to pay (even if it is 10cents) to send the email to a whole list of people who have requested it (like, 10000 people on a mailing list for a joke site) will they still send them, at the risk of loosing a lot of money? And besides, they won't really want to be putting possible thousands on the line for a free service.