Knocking The Steve may be fashionable, but that's ignoring the huge amount of hardware and software engineering work over the decades that he oversaw at Apple. It might not have rocked the world like inventing C or UNIX but it's not insignificant.
I agree. After talking this much about complexity, it is rather simplistic of him to praise Ritchie over Jobs in terms of impact.
On the one hand, I can imagine where the computing world would be without the work that Jobs did and the people he inspired: probably a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square. Deep inside, though, our devices would still work the same way and do the same things.
Well, actually you can't imagine what computing world would have been like unless you assume technology develops in a purely deterministic manner, in the absence of any market or cultural influences. There is a name for this line of thinking: hindsight bias[0].
Also, in the presence of this level of complexity and different layers, comparing people's impact would be necessarily subjective and rather reductionist in that, a la computers a bit less shiny, a bit more beige, a bit more square sans Jobs. This would do disservice to the legacies of both Ritchie and Jobs.
Not only does the articled underestimate Jobs' influence, it also in my opinion (and I realize this may brand me as a heretic) overstates Ritchies' influence.
It's not as if there were no time sharing operating systems prior to UNIX, or no OS development concurrent with UNIX, and the same can certainly be said about C (in fact, many people would argue that C had a deleterious effect on computing overall).
A computing world based on e.g. Lisp and ITS, or Smalltalk, or Algol 68 and MULTICS would certainly look different than what we have now, but it's not a given to me that it would be inferior to what we have now.
I had not realized that Dennis Ritchie was dead, so I think he made his point about which person dominated the popular media, even if both were of similar importance.
Both were important people, but the kind of work they did definitely affected who would be more familiar with them.
Steve probably did as much as anyone to promote *nix, even if it was BSD, FWIW.
