Remembering the Great Ones

The technology industry lost a great innovator when Steve Jobs died this year at the age of 56. Jobs was known to demand center stage, which may have overshadowed the passing of Dennis Ritchie, Jean Bartik and Michael Hart. Without these visionaries, our favorite technologies, like Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle, may never have existed. Each contributed a unique and vital part to the history of technology, from the infrastructure to the language to the idea of freely sharing content. We would like to honor these giants of technology.

Dennis Ritchie (1941 – 2011)

Dennis Ritchie developed the C programming language, which was a new philosophy in programming as much as it was a language. Concise and elegant, C and its progeny (including Java and C++) make up the world’s most popular programming languages. From this foundation, Ritchie, along with colleague Ken Thompson, developed UNIX—the predecessor of Linux and the heart and soul of many operating systems, including those of Apple.

Without Dennis Ritchie, personal computers and the Internet would not be what they are today.

Jean Bartik (1924 – 2011)

Jean Bartik was a lead programmer, one of the world’s first, on ENIAC (Electronic Numeral Integrator and Computer), the first all-electronic digital computer. Bartik, with a B.S. in mathematics, was employed by the Army as a computer (when the term referred to a person) to program ENIAC. She went on to help convert ENIAC into a stored program computer, reducing program set-up from weeks to hours, and later worked on UNIVAC, the first commercial computer.

At the time, Bartik and many other women programmers were not given the recognition they deserved. Bartik and her colleagues are now celebrated as pioneers of modern computing.

Michael Hart (1947 – 2011)

Michael Hart was the father of the e-book. On July 4^th, 1971, he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer and made it available for download by users of Arpanet (a precursor to the Internet). This was the beginning of Project Gutenberg. Hart went on to hand type several books, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and the King James Bible. He saw that information sharing was the future and he continued his work for decades before the world caught up.

Currently, Project Gutenberg offers more than 36,000 e-books in several languages. According to Hart, one of the goals of Project Gutenberg is to “help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy.”