Seems that many people was concerned about Steve Jobs, he was a CEO, one of the most important contributors to make home computing something feasible, and closer to many people. But nothing about those successful products is possible without the contributions made by Dennis Ritchie. If you have a good knowledge on computing history, Dennis Ritchie was the creator — with Brian Kernigan and Ken Thompson — of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system. Also creator of the Plan 9 operating system — with Rob Pike.
Such size of contribution is clearly visible on most operating systems today. With Unix he started the time sharing era, where all desktop operating systems and most servers that are running today can run multiple tasks with the sensation of plain and transparent execution. Also, most operating systems are written on its core base in the C programming language, which is a common language for system programming, a well known friend on system programming tasks.
Mac OS X was born on the basis of a Berkeley Software Distribution operating system. Its kernel is a combination of the XNU/BSD and FreeBSD, where the XNU micro-kernel was adopted using the FreeBSD kernel services, and that kernel was called Darwin. The base system — most command line utilities — of the Mac OS X, iOS and related operating systems, are made on top of the FreeBSD operating system. And FreeBSD was born from 4.4BSD, and the father of the 4.4BSD operating system was UNIX. So, it is not strange to find utilities with a long history.
Also, the basis of the NeXT operating system is a BSD variant. What was adopted by the current Mac OS X from NeXT?, just the UI API calls. The complete UI API calls and classes defined in the Objective-C programming language — an object-based variant of the C programming language, and hybrid between C and Smalltalk — are made on top of the OpenStep standard, which is a variant and direct descendant of the NeXT Step UI API.
So, many ideas are not new. I think that the great inventor was Dennis Ritchie, and Steve Jobs was good orchestrating technologies, using the right technology on the right place.
What I want to rescue from this, is the fact that if you want a successful company, you must work as team. A good inventor cannot work alone if he does not know where to place a technology of his invention. A good CEO or manager cannot work alone if he does not know how to build a technology. So, both and working as team are required to successful build a good technology. If you are planning a company, associate with a good co-founder CTO.
Also, I was watching on the TV an interview related to Steve Jobs to a well known twitter user here in Chile [@stark], and I was really disappointed with how wrong was the information provided by that guy.
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