[PLUG-TALK] Dennis Ritchie vs. Steve Jobs

[Keith Lofstrom]

Both Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie have done great things for me.
Of the two, Ritchie has done far more.

In 1978, I did a consulting job for jazz musician Herbie Hancock;
he used about 12 analog music synthesizers and wanted to control
them at concerts from two or three keyboards.  I built a computer
controlled analog crossbar switch box, and needed a controller.
At the time, the supported options were the LSI-11 and the Apple
II.  In a break during recording at the United Western Studios,
I pitched both, suggesting the Apple II.  Herbie was convinced;
so were the other musicians, technicians, and the producer.  
Herbie wanted the top of the line Apple II, with color card and
max memory and TWO floppy drives.  And so did all the rest.  They
all handed me their American Express Gold Cards.  With the keyboard
manager (who was managing and imagining this computer control
project), we went to the Santa Monica Byte Shop (the biggest computer 
store in SoCal - and perhaps the only computer store in SoCal) and
bought out their entire inventory of Apple IIs.  Including the demo
machines.  Including the ones that the teenager hackers were using
in the store.  A delivery truck followed us back to United Western.

That was probably one of the small essential events that tied the
Apple community to the professional music community.  

I had a Lisa.  I had a Mac 256K.  But I abandoned them for BSD
Unix (actually, the "UTek" variant on the lamented Tektronix
workstations), and the ability to Write My Own Code.  Writing
code for Mac (with their event loop model and their huge API)
was beyond my skill level.

Then came the BSDI lawsuit, where ATT was suing the first "open
source" operating system as a derived work.  IIRC, Dennis Ritchie
testified for BSDI, in spite of being employed by Bell Labs.
Ritchie also supported Linux and the defense in the SCO lawsuit.

Steve Jobs remained a player in the computer industry with the
Next, which was based on BSD.  That was the lever he used to
get Apple back from the suits.  And Next became OS-X, which is
heavily (and openly) base on BSD.  Steve Jobs would be a footnote
in computer history without BSD.

Steve Jobs entertained me.  Steve Jobs made nifty and expensive
products - Ikea versus Bill Gate's Microsoft/WalMart.  When I
need to steer a person away from Windows, but cannot provide
glitzy advertising to convince a media-saturated brain to switch
to Linux (or BSD), I set them up with a Mac Mini.  Slightly more
free, much less painful, much safer on the Internet, better than
remaining with Windows.

Towards the end of his 56 years, Steve Jobs was ready to spend
his entire fortune fighting Google and Android (see last week's
Oregonian).  But because of his illness, he was too exhausted
to do so.  Steve Jobs was never a friend of Libre software.

So, I am glad Steve Jobs lived when he did, and accomplished what
he did.  He made a major contribution.  I am also, shamefully
perhaps, glad that he died when he did.  Had he lived, he would
have become a monster, destroying freedom and impoverishing Apple,
Google, and his heirs.  Only the young die good, though Dennis
Ritchie somehow remained young and good to age 71.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs