Marathon Woman!

In many of the companies I've worked for, my mates were very concerned about their fitness, and in some of them they were real fans of running, participating in amateur marathons and popular races.
At IBM it is different: as everything we do at IBM, we take things quite seriously. I can say that my mates take running almost as a profession, and I give you here an example. I'd like you to meet Pilar:

Pilar, training with her husband Galo

She is not only a marathon woman, she is a work mate (a very busy one!) and a mother of family, a person I really admire, full of energy and optimism. You can follow her on her blog, where she is describing how she is preparing her New York Marathon (she finds time to attend meetings at the office, presentations with her sponsor, training for the competition, and of course quality time for her family, just amazing!). And not only that, after competing in New York, she will go to THE marathon: the Athens Marathon! I really envy her.
Go Pilar, we support you!

Dennis M. Ritchie (1941 - 2011)

During this few weeks we have been shocked by the death of one of the most charismatic personalities in the computer industry and in the world in general, as he is credited of having changed our habits and of having brought the technology to the masses. Yes, I'm talking of Steve Jobs. But he has not been the only great loss we have had these days, we have lost one of the men who made possible the dream of Steve Jobs, I'm talking of Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie.

I'm not going to start a discussion of who was more important, Jobs or Ritchie, my opinion is that without men like Jobs the technology would not be spread as a commodity today, and men like Ritchie would not be possible; and without the Ritchies of the world it would not be possible the scientific advance in computer science, and thus there would be no Jobs to woo users with fantastic devices. So, both have their role in the business, and no one is to be underestimated, but, as Jobs has received plenty of attention, I think Ritchie deserves this little homage.

Maybe a usual reader of this blog already know about the work of Dennis Ritchie, but I just want to underline his two most important contributions, or at least the most famous inventions of this great man.

The first contribution is the co-creation of the Unix operating system. Ritchie worked at Bell Labs with other geniuses (Thomson, Kernigan, McIllroy and Ossanna). The first implementation of Unix was done in a PDP-7 machine from Digital, and was written in machine code.

As this was a relatively poor performing machine, they asked permission to port the Unix OS they have created to a more powerful PDP-11 machine. Although the original porting of the system was done also in machine code, sooner they wrote most of the core of the operating system in C language, a language that has been developed entirely by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973.

This was quite important: they proved that an operating system could be written in a high level language (although some other attempts were made before, they were not so successful), so it became a much more easier task than doing it in machine code and could add more features to the OS. And it was a way to facilitate the porting of the operating system to any other computer: as it was not written in machine code, with a few minor changes it could be compiled in any system they wanted Unix to be run.

And the rest, well, is history now. Unix spread out of the Bell Labs and can be considered as the backbone of the Internet as we know it, as most servers (and enterprise server outside the Internet, like Netezza for example) run any variant of Unix (AIX, Solaris, HP-UX), or its clones like Linux (you know, Linux Is Not UniX, but it was clearly inspired by it). Even in the mass consumer market we can see Unix: Apple's operating systems for the iPhone, iPad, MacBooks... are all based on Unix.

And what to say about the C language. Until the advent of Java (not counting its variant C++) it was the most used programming language, present everywhere, in every Windows flavor and application, and it is still in good shape, very close to this first position as the most used programming language.

In summary, Internet, the IT industry, would not be as we know it without Dennis Ritchie. Thanks you Dennis.

Afterword: Of course Jobs did a great job spreading the technologies created by the Ritchies of the world, as I said. Just a couple of things about Jobs. A link to its famous phrase "good artists copy, great artists steal", by the way, stolen from Picasso...and probably misinterpreted too. And a recommendation of a movie, "Pirates of Silicon Valley". Maybe it is not a master piece, but shows very well, in my opinion, the beginnings and the personalities of Jobs and in a second level, of Bill Gates.