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Ideally Blue

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Ideally Blue

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Oct 13 / 12:36am

Dennis M. Ritchie, R.I.P.

Dennis Ritchie passed away last weekend. He was one of the great minds in systems research and development, father of the C programming language, and one of the big contributors to Unix, both of which power the Mac on which I'm typing this, the iPhone on my desk, the Windows machine I use at work, the servers on which this blog is hosted, and much of the infrastructure both you and I use to connect to it.

May he Rest in Peace.

 

This makes three consecutive obituaries in my blog, of three great minds that have passed away in the last couple of weeks. All three of them were giants in their fields, and their fields were related and interconnected. Dennis Ritchie built much of the foundations on which our current technologies are based; Gene Schultz worked tirelessly to make them more secure; and Steve Jobs worked tirelessly to make them a joy to use.

In my everyday work and life, even just here, in the devices on my desk, I can see and experience the work and passion of these three men. I feel honored to have met them, either in person or through their work.

 

Filed under  //  dennisritchie   geneschultz   obituary   people   stevejobs  
 
Oct 6 / 12:26am

Steve Jobs, R.I.P.

Farewell, Steve. Thank you for all you did for the computer industry, for design, for music, for telephony, and for so many other aspects of our lives. You will be missed.

Acibibhg
Filed under  //  obituary   people   stevejobs  
 
Oct 3 / 11:08pm

Gene Schultz, R.I.P.

A few days ago I learned through Spaf that Gene Schultz had had a severe accident and was hospitalized. Later we learned that the accident was apparently caused by an earlier stroke that went unrecognized. Yesterday, October 2nd, during the afternoon, Gene passed away.

I met Gene about 15 years ago while I was a grad student at Purdue. I met him initially at a couple of conferences, and later while he was visiting Purdue for some time. I never took a class with him, but for a while we sat in cubicles right across from each other (this was when CERIAS was very young, and we were still in the old COAST lab room in the Purdue CS Department). I remember talking to him all the time during those days, both about computer security and about silly stuff, questions he had about how things worked at the lab, how to say things in Spanish, or anything else that came to mind.  He had a great sense of humor, and he treated everyone the same, including us, the "lowly grad students" that sat around him.

Eventually we went our separate ways, exchanging email only every once in a while. In the last few months I had more frequent contact with him in the context of the COSE Editorial Board. In every exchange he was the same - kind, knowledgeable and fun.

May he Rest in Peace.

Gene Spafford has written a beautiful tribute for Gene Schultz.
Filed under  //  geneschultz   obituary   people   tribute