Quote:
Originally Posted by daemonfowl
1- Most innovative programmer of the last century ?
Dennis Ritchie
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It's good to add on the list Fernando José Corbató -
w w w . multicians . org/corby.html
Not mention Ken Thompson...
The UNIX Time-Sharing System, edycja; Bell System Technical Journal, v 57: No 6 July-August 1978 ---
w w w 3 . alcatel-lucent . com/bstj/vol57-1978/articles/bstj57-6-1905.pdf
Above text was first published in the Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 7, July, 1974, pp. 365-375.
In 1971 when UNIX was moved to a PDP-11, system was characterized by its small size: 16K bytes for the system, 8K bytes for user programs, a disk of 512K bytes, and a limit of 64K bytes per file. After its early success, Thompson set out to implement a Fortran compiler for the new system, but instead came up with the language B, influenced by BCPL. B was interpretive language with the performance drawbacks implied by such languages, so Ritchie developed it into one he called C, allowing generation of machine code, declaration of data types, and definition of data strucures. In 1973, the operating system was rewritten in C, an unheard of step at the time, but on that was to have tremendous impact on its acceptance among outside users. And these is the real heritage of the UNIX. Kernel that is written almost in 100% in high level language --> witch determine its portability to other computer platforms.
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