What did we learn from Dennis, the father of UNIX?

We are all familiar with the father of UNIX, and also the father of C language support Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, who left us last week. However, he has a big influence on computer science and related fields, and can even be named together with Turing, the father of computer science, and Steve Jobs, who recently died (although there may be some controversy, but history tells us this is true ).

UNIX is a powerful multi-user, multi-task operating system that supports multiple processor architectures. UNXI was developed in this way. At that time, Ken Thompson, a UNIX developer, developed a Space Travel game. After running on MULTICS, he found that the game was slow and expensive, at that time, it took us $75 to run. At that time, the US $75 was a large amount. The high price made computer enthusiasts unable to get interested. Therefore, Dennis and Thompson worked together to create their paradise for fans, a place where they could test small programs and share results. He was born from physics and mathematics, but fell in love with computer science at the right time. The most important concept of the UNIX system they created is "sharing ". So what can we learn from this computer giant?

First, you must be interested in what you have done. Their original intention was not to make money. In fact, they started out to save money or install their games into a cheaper machine.

Second, it is necessary to work out of the comfort zone. Dennis is a physicist and mathematician, but he has become the most legendary programmer. Apparently, his professional background helped him develop C or UNIX. As Dennis Ritchie said: Dennis is not afraid to work in a strange field, if Dennis spent decades on Obscure Mathematics, UNIX might be dead.

Third, we must have innovative thinking. Dennis was lucky to be at the Bell lab, where he was well-funded and had no shortage of employees, so that he had the right to work with his friends to develop what they wanted according to their schedule.

Finally, we need to know how to share it. Nowadays, many companies prefer to keep their core technologies confidential, but this is not a success in my opinion. Their ideas and attitudes are not conducive to the company's development.

It can be said that the most important software in the world today is UNIX. It is important because it is open and available to anyone. A lot of people may say that openness is the same as that of ignorance. In my opinion, such people are the most pessimistic and stupid.

Dennis also taught us that the computer world is not an unfathomable world. Although no one of us may achieve his or bell/AT&T achievements, especially considering their background and the origins of the information age, this is not important. After all, we have learned many things from UNIX source code over the years: "You don't need to understand it." You just need to create more valuable things based on it.

Via TC

(Annie is for the record of Lei Feng network. For more information, see !)