![]() There is very little it can’t do, and very little that hasn’t been done with it. Saron Yitabrek, host of the Command Heroes podcast, describes C as “a nearly universal tool for programming just as capable on a personal computer as it was on a supercomputer.”Ĭ has been called a Swiss Army language. It isn’t prescriptive, but it doesn’t leave you completely lost. It blended, as some might say, perfectly abstract functions and methods for creating predictable software patterns with the ability to get right down to the metal if needed. As more programmers tried C, they adapted to it quickly. That language is called C.īy the time Unix shipped, it had been fully rewritten in C, and the programming language came bundled in every operating system that ran on top of it, which, as it turned out, was a lot of them. Instead, he created a compiled programming language with many of the same features as B, but with more access to the kinds of things you could expect from assembly code. Ritchie’s solution was to choose neither. B also suffered under the weight of its own design it was slow to execute and lacked the resilience needed for time-sharing environments. However, it lacked features Ritchie felt were crucial. B was much simpler to code with, several steps abstracted from the bare metal. Ritchie’s other option was to use B, an interpreted programming language developed by his co-worker Ken Thompson. The process, on the other hand, was laborious and prone to errors. Programming directly in assembly - being “close to the metal” as some programmers refer to it - made Unix blazing fast and memory efficient. He had been writing most of Unix in assembly code, quite literally feeding paper tape into the computer, the way it was done in the earliest days of computing. More precisely, his problem was with the language the software ran on. Ritchie’s problem was with Unix’s software. They transformed Multics into a new operating system adaptable and extendable enough to be used for networked time sharing. But Ritchie and a few of his colleagues refused to let the dream go. Still, after years of development and little to show for it, Bell eventually dropped the project. He was fiercely passionate about what he saw as the future of computing. While there, Ritchie had worked on a time-sharing project known as Multics. A hotbed of innovation, in the 60s, and 70s, Bell employed some of the greatest minds in telecommunications. It needed to run anywhere and it needed to be fast. ![]() ![]() He and a few other colleagues were building it from the ground up to be simple and clean and versatile. He was working on a new, world class operating system. He convinces the higher-ups in the organizations to put the web in the public domain so anyone can use it. Sir Tim Berners-Lee creates the technologies behind the web - HTML, HTTP, and the URL which blend hypertext with the Internet - with a small team at CERN. ![]()
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