Dennis Ritchie the father of UNIX died the week after Steve Jobs.  The Steve Jobs passing made the news all over, but hardly a ripple was felt when Dennis died.  It might be said, “No Dennis Ritchie, no Steve Jobs.”

Dennis also contributed the C Programming Language in which UNIX was re-written in the summer of 1973.  C  was the low level language you used when were telling your boss that were are using a high level language.  Insider joke.

There’s more about Dennis at his Wikipedia page.

I got my first UNIX login in 1974 when my co-worker Mike Bianchi suggested we maintain the source of our project on the UNIX based Programmer’s Workbench and use rje or remote job entryto the IBM mainframe for compilation and object storage.  I think we were the second project to embrace it.  The developers were in our building and the feedback between them and us was very rapid.  I even got a nice trip to San Francisco for a Software Engineering Conference.