giovedì 9 febbraio 2012

IEEE Spectrum, Unix and dmr

It did not suprise me to find an article about Unix on the 2011 last issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine. While start reading the article, that I found quite accurate and precise, I was thinking it was  a tribute to the great Dennis Ritchie (dmr), one of the Unix inventors. Surprisingly, it was not! 
The article tells about the Unix history, but did not report at all any tribute to dmr, except for this three lines statement:


Many other, often very personal, tributes to Ritchie and his enormous influence on computing were widely shared after his death this past October.

The article also did not include a personal photo of Mr. Ritchie, or better, it does include the classical and well known picture of him with his friend and colleague Mr. Thompson, but it also includes a personal photo of the latter and none of Mr. Ritchie. I'm not going to accuse IEEE Spectrum, and IEEE in general, since it did a blog post about the death of Mr. Ritchie. Nevertheless I find this article is missing a great tribute to one of the men that changed the world at all. Without Mr. Ritchie (and the others) we would not have any sort of *nix, including the one that runs on smartphones, tablet, and so on. While blog posts are going to survive much longer than printed paper, I think that not doing a tribute to Mr. Ritchie in one of the mainstream magazines of IEEE has been a lack. 
Similar considerations can be done for the missing of Mr. Jobs. While I'm not a fan of the latter, I think that a "computing" magazine should not have missed such kind of tributes.

Nessun commento: