Yup I know it’s been a while. I’ve been busy with Work Stuff ™. We’ve lost Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and Robert Galvin all just recently. These men have either directly changed your entire life, or indirectly. Ritchie is the R of K&R C, better known simply as ‘C’ — the computer language that pretty much begat EVERYTHING we use today. Java, written in C. PHP, written in C. Windows? Yup. Linux? Yup. In fact there’s almost nothing that doesn’t at least have SOME C code in it. While today’s C has a lot added onto it compared to K&R C it is still recognizable to anyone who learned the old K&R C. As I sit here I’ve got within fairly easy reach an 80GB “Classic” iPod. I know there are at least two others in the house. Jobs’ utterly relentless pursuit of design, engineering, and business converged to create the Mac, and everything that followed.

Robert Galvin was the CEO of Motorola. Motorola almost single handedly developed a huge amount of the wireless technology we all take for granted. They certainly had no small amount of help from Bell labs (where Ritchie worked).

We’re rapidly losing the men and women who helped us create our modern technological society. Who shaped our current world in ways that most will never even begin to understand, and that no one could fully comprehend. Let us hope that we can continue that legacy.