RIP Dennis Ritchie. We all owe a great debt to you.<p>Heck, here I sit typing this in Firefox, written in C++, a derivative of C, on OS X, a derivative of the UNIX system. I have a Terminal open with which I am compiling PHP, written in C. His works are still relevant to today's world beyond the grave.
The phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants" comes to mind when watching the video.<p>I wonder if Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie even imagined at the time that their creation will still be carried in the pockets of over a billion people 30 years later.
I don't know why it just happened now, but it finally dawned on me after seeing the video's kernel/shell/utilities graphic: the shell is a wrapper around the kernel.
The other film:<p>"The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use"<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw</a>
I found the old Episodes of Computer Chronicles on Unix interesting to watch: <a href="https://archive.org/details/UNIX1985" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/UNIX1985</a> and <a href="https://archive.org/details/unix_2" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/unix_2</a><p>Totally unrelated: Gary Kildall comes across as if he's been a really nice guy. Poor guy. :(
Looking at the wikipedia article on Ritchie, I found this photo of attendees of the 1984 Usenix Conference [0].<p>At the bottom of the page it points out some faces. There is a tall guy to Dennis' right, named as Erik Fair (not familiar with him, I'll admit) but he looks a lot like Larry Wall.<p>The only other face I recognised was Peter Langston, it demonstrates how little is known by the general public (including myself) about the contributions of all these people to CS.<p>[0] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usenix84_1.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Usenix84_1.jpg</a>