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C Programming Language

Dennies Ritchie’s Contribution To Programming And Origin of C Language

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Nowadays computer science is a mandatory subject in schools. Though computer science is optional in high school, everyone acquires knowledge of basic computing at an early age. And, when we take steps towards learning how to code, we always start with the C language. At least most of us opt for it. The c programming language is one of the most famous and earliest programming languages around the world. The language can be used extensively for programming operating systems and embedded systems. After the first version by Dennis, so many versions of the language have come up but currently, C18 is the most recent.

About Founder

Dennis Ritchie
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Dennis Ritchie, an American computer scientist is the creator of the C language. He has also developed the Unix Operating System and B language. Dennis received many prestigious awards for his excellent works and contribution to society. He is one of the reasons our world has come so far in terms of technicality.

Early Life

Born into Bronxville, New York, Dennis moved to New Jersey at a very young age. Alistair E. Ritchie, one of the scientists of the Bell Labs was father to Dennis Ritchie. After the family moved to Summit, Dennis attended the Summit High School. Later, Dennis went to Harvard University and acquired degrees in Physics and Applied Mathematics.

Early Career

After graduating, Dennis joined Bell Labs in 1967. He was carrying out his Ph.D. under Patrick C. Fisher at Harvard University. But, he was never able to receive the degree officially. When Dennis started working at the Bell Labs, Ken Thompson worked as a colleague of him. Both of them were working on the Multics operating system.

During this time, Thompson discovered an old PDP-7 and he started developing an operating system along with Dennis. In 1970, the operating system which they named “Unix” was finally completed. Eventually, Dennis came up with the B language followed by the C language.

Origin of C Programming Language

After Dennis and Thompson developed the Unix operating system, they decided to port the operating system in PDP-11. Once they incorporated Unix, Dennis needed to come up with a new language or rather a new compiler to make use of this operating system in PDP-11.

Dennis started working in Fortran, but he gave up after some time because it wasn’t possible in that language. Then he started working with BPCL systems programming language but there wasn’t much information about the official description of the language.

Thompson along with Dennis came up with B language but the language was too slow and it didn’t adjust well with the features of PDP-11. So, Dennis tried to modify the language and make some changes. But, doing that led to the invention of a whole new programming language, that is, C.

In 1972, the C compiler was used for version 2 Unix and the fourth version of the OS was released in November 1973. The other versions of C were ANSI C, ISO C, C99, C11, and Embedded C.

Other Works

Apart from working with the C language and Unix operating system, Dennis also wrote a book, The C Programming Language along with Kernighan.

He also worked for the development of operating systems like Plan 9 and Inferno. Dennis also helped in creating the programming language, Limbo. Dennis worked for Lucent Technologies until he retired in 2007.

Awards and Achievements

In 1983, both Dennis and Thompson were honored with the Turing Award. They received for the award for making significant progress in the field of generic operating systems theory and for developing Unix. In 1990, again this couple bagged the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal for both the Unix OS and C language.

This decade was followed by receiving a fellowship from the Computer History Museum in 1997. In April 1999, Bill Clinton awarded both of them with the National Medal of Technology. In 2005, Ritchie received the Achievement Award from Industrial Research Institute mainly for Unix. He was also honored with the Japan Prize for Information and Communications in 2011. Thompson received this prize along with him.

Retired Life

He worked for Lucent Technologies after leaving Bell Labs. In 2007, Dennis stepped down from the research department. He passed away on 12th October 2011. He was suffering from prostate cancer and heart disease.

activision

David Crane : The Famous Videogame Guru and Co-founder of Activision

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Video games have introduced us to a new world, and every game lover might be familiar with the names like Hideo Kojima and Sid Meier. These are the video game designers who are none less than the Hollywood superstars. But at the beginning of the video games, despite developing the most famous games, the designers did not get the due credits. They were sitting behind the name of the company that launched the game and just kept working months of tedious and insomniac hours. But then, some of the designers took control in their hands, and it was the time for a change. One such video game designer is David Crane, the co-founder of Activision, who is a superstar designer and is widely known for the video game Pitfall!.

Crane is an American programmer and video game designer who was born in Nappanee, Indiana, the US in 1953. After completing his school education from a local high school, he went to the DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, Arizona, where he completed a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering Technology degree. Soon after graduating as an engineer, he joined National Semiconductor as a hardware designer.

With time, he became interested in video game designing and development, so at the age of 29, he started working for Atari. He took the responsibility of developing games for Atari 2600. He also became the part of the team that was working on the Atari 800 computer operating system.

David Crane Activision
Image Source: ivghof.info

During the late 70s, the main game developers, including Crane, Larry Kaplan, Alan Miller and Bob Whitehead, of the company were in talks with the company management to get the developers their due credit. At the time, the company was also under the acquisition of its new owner Warner Communications, and it has many unsolved issues as well. The company refused to give those developers any extra financial compensation or credits, as it was afraid that those developers could get better options elsewhere.

Based on a memo of the best-selling video games of the past few years, Crane had designed few of the best selling games of the company, yet he was not given any bonuses or even the credits for that. With 20 million sold copies of games developed by him, he only earned a $20,000 salary.

One fine day, during a Tennis match, Crane and Miller got into a serious discussion about how the companies were taking all the credit for the game development when it was all the hard work of the designer. Concluding to this, they planned to leave their jobs and start a new gaming company that would not only promote the company, but also the designer who designed the games.

In 1979, along with Miller, Kaplan and Whitehead, Crane left Atari to start their own company. But they had no idea from where to start, as at that time only the companies that manufactured the consoles published the games. To start a business, they needed the money and for that, they met another budding entrepreneur Jim Levy, who was already planning to start a business of manufacturing cassette tape drives. With the help of Levy, they managed to raise US$1 million in capital from Sutter Hill Ventures.

The five co-founders finally founded Activision on 1 October 1979. But they were hit by a lawsuit from Atari, claiming that the four developers from Atari had stolen the company secrets. So, despite the knowledge of Atari 2600 and its gaming development, they had to create Activision’s own version of games that differ from the Atari games visually.

But since all the four were experienced enough, the games that they built were way better and had credits for the developers along with the instruction manual.

In 1982, Crane developed the most successful game of his career, i.e., Pitfall!. Within one year of its launch, Activision sold 4 million copies of the game and became the second best-selling game of the year. It also made a total revenue of US$60 million in just one year for Activision. The game maintained its place in the Billboard charts for 64 weeks and was also awarded the game of the year in 1982. This was a game-changer for Crane, and he was famous in no time.

By 1983, the company has already hired around 60 employees. After working for seven years with Activision, Crane left the company in 1986 and co-founded Absolute Entertainment with Garry Kitchen. With Absolute, he developed two of the most famous games of his career, David Crane’s Amazing Tennis and A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia. In his entire career, he has developed over 30 video games.

Crane came with another venture in 1995, named as Skyworks Technologies and served the company as the CTO. His last known game as a game designer is March of the Penguins (2006). His estimated worth as reported in 2016 was $200 million. Currently, he is working as an independent video game developer and video game expert witness. The decision he, and his fellow programmers, to build a company that promoted the designers of the video games, not only made them celebrities, but the other designers in the world also started getting their deserved recognition.

PHP

Rasmus Lerdorf : An Insightful Programmer and the Creator of PHP

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The history of PHP programming language narrates the story of a programmer who prefers to be known as an engineer than a coder. Because according to this engineer, the end product is what matters the most and not the journey to it. Well, seems like his mind works more like a thermodynamic state function and less like a path-dependent parameter, isn’t it?

This remarkably excellent engineer is none other than world-famous programmer Rasmus Lerdorf. On one of his interviews, Lerdorf said that coding is quite boring and tedious, which is insignificant contrast to who he is and his occupation. So, let’s get to know more about this big guy and his ‘path’ to success.

Early Life

Rasmus Lerdorf
Image Source: staticflickr.com

Born into a family from Disko Island, Greenland, on 22nd November 1968, Rasmus Lerdorf moved to Denmark at an early age of three. At the age of fifteen, Lerdorf and his family moved to King City, Ontario. In 1988, Lerdorf graduated from King City Secondary School and pursued his higher studies from the University of Waterloo. He graduated from the university in 1993 with a bachelor’s degree of Applied Science in Systems Designing Engineering.

After he graduated, Lerdorf made significant contributions to the relational database management systems like Oracle Rdb.

Working With Programming Languages

When the programmers and the tech-savvies were working in the mid-90s with their main motive to make the internet more efficient and faster, he got hindered by languages like C and Perl. According to Rasmus Lerdorf, designing websites with these languages were too time consuming and needed to come up with a new one.

Lerdorf, along with some of the technical writers, assembled their ideas together and got them online as an HTML page. He wanted to take a step ahead, only when some companies asked for these documents or expand the idea and implement it in the practical world.

Creating PHP

He started working in CGI (common gateway interface), developed few libraries, wrote some programs in C, and finally, developed PHP, an entirely new language. Lerdorf created PHP (personal home page, now known as hypertext preprocessor) in 1994, and till now, many modified versions of the language has been released.

In a generalized way, PHP is a programming language that was designed for web development and can be used almost on every operating system. The most recent version of PHP is PHP 7.3 released on 6th December 2018.

After PHP became a very well known and useful language to big companies, Rasmus Lerdorf explained that he never intended to create a programming language, as he had no clue how to build one. He was making logical implementations to create something simpler than Perl, and one thing led to another. Finally, after forming a tech team to assist him with technical documentation, which followed beta testing, PHP/FI 2 was released in November 1997.

The Success

Today, PHP is a majorly used programming language, being used by websites like Etsy, Wikipedia, Tumblr, Yahoo, Flickr, Facebook, and many more.

Over the years, many features have been incorporated in PHP, but Lerdorf keeps telling one thing to every emerging engineer out there, that for a programmer, it is very important to understand C very well. Though he accepts that as compared to languages, like Python or C++, the user needs to put comparatively more effort using C, but it is the fundamental unit of learning for any programmer.

After releasing PHP, he worked with different big tech companies, and currently, he is working with Etsy.

Career of Lerdorf

In January 2000, Rasmus Lerdorf joined Linuxcare Inc. as a senior research engineer and continued for a year. In September 2002, he joined Yahoo! where he continued for seven years, as an Infrastructure Architecture Engineer. Lerdorf said that eventually, he became tired and kind of demoralized working in an ad centric web company, as it involves tricking your customers.

He joined Room 77 as an advisor in 2010, and then, it’s all about WePay and Etsy. It’s been eleven years, that he has been working in Etsy, first as an advisor, and then, as a distinguished engineer.

Lerdorf as every other enthusiastic programmer is very much interested in open source, and he attends the open-source conferences as a speaker throughout the world.

Dave Winer : American Software Developer & the Fore-father of Blogging

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Publishing is what Winer was always interested in. An MS in Computer Science, he detested computers and the engineering culture at the school level and became familiar with computers only when he went to the college. Winer is a New York-based American software developer and entrepreneur, who is best known for his writing and his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services. For his writing, he has earned titles like “protoblogger” and is counted among “most influential web voices” of Silicon Valley.

Early Life

Dave Winer was born on 2 May 1955, in Brooklyn, New York City. His father Eve Winer was a PhD and a school psychologist. His mother Leon Winer was also a Ph.D., and a former professor of the Columbia University Graduate School of Business. In 1972, he completed his high school from the Bronx High School of Science. In high school, he started an underground newspaper. Later, he joined the Tulane University in New Orleans and graduated in Mathematics in the year 1976. He then completed an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, in 1978.

Early Career

After completing his education, Winer started working in the computer time-sharing business, in the Empire State Building on the thirty-ninth floor. Later, he moved to Silicon Valley and joined a leading software company at the time, Personal Software, Inc., as the lead developer. The company worked on a software product VisiCalc, and he began to work on his own product idea named VisiText. While in the company, he came to the conclusion that the company did not ship what it produced. At the same time, the company started working on a commercial product around an “expand and collapse” outline display, an outliner software product.

winer
Image Source: Wikipedia

In 1981, he left Personal Software and founded his own company named Living Videotext, where he further worked on the outliner. In 1983, he released ThinkTank for Apple II, which was based on VisiText, followed by the release of ThinkTank for IBM PC and Macintosh, etc.

In 1987, Winer sold Living Videotext to Symantec. The deal paid him a fortune, and he worked with the newly formed Symantec’s Living Videotext division for the next six months.

UserLand

The next year, in1988, Winer founded another company named UserLand Software and was appointed the CEO of the company. Under the name of the company, he released a system-level, outliner-based scripting language, Frontier, for Mac. In the mid-90s, Winer became interested in online publishing while helping automate the production process of the strikers’ online newspaper. He started working towards online publishing and developed a website for himself the ‘Scripting News’, in February 1997. Scripting News is described as “one of the web’s oldest blogs.”

In the same year, he started Frontier’s NewsPage, supporting Scripting News. Later, he, along with Microsoft, developed the XML-RPC protocol, resulting in the formation of SOAP, that he co-authored jointly with Microsoft’s Don Box, Bob Atkinson, and Mohsen Al-Ghosein. In the same year, he developed an XML syndication format for his Scripting News weblog in order to provide his readers with much more timely information.

During the same time, RSS was created for use on the My.Netscape.Com portal, preceded by several trials at web syndication that did not obtain much popularity. In July 1999, Dan Libby produced a new version of RSS, RSS 0.91 incorporating elements from Dave Winer’s news syndication format. In April 2001, Netscape dropped RSS support from My.Netscape.Com and Winer, along with RSS-DEV Working Group, published a modified version of the RSS 0.91 specification on the UserLand website. With a set of changes, Winer also released RSS 0.92 in December 2000 and RSS 2.0 in September 2002.

By 1999, Winer had become the leader in blogging tools and a leading evangelist of weblogs. The InfoWorld named him one of the “Top Ten Technology Innovators” in February 2000.

DaveNet

In November 1994, Winer originated DaveNet, to replace the standard news channels of the software business. DaveNet distributed newsletters over email and stored the goofy and informational web archives on it. Few of his newsletters included complaints against Apple’s management. The HotWired also published his censored columns from DaveNet, between June 1995 and May 1996. DaveNet won the Cool Site of the Day award in March 1995 but was discontinued in 2004.

Podcasting

Winer was receiving more requests for audio blogging features in the RSS from his readers and other bloggers, upon which he decided to include a new functionality in RSS 0.92, named the enclosure, that would transfer the address of a media file to the RSS aggregator. On January 2001, he first demonstrated this new feature in his Scripting News weblog, by enclosing the song Grateful Dead in it. With a built-in aggregator for both “send” and “receive” components in Userland’s weblogging product, Radio Userland, many of its users started doing audio blogging on it. In February 2004, Ben Hammersley suggested the word ‘Podcasting’ for ‘Audioblogging’.

Along with UserLand, Scripting News and Podcast, Winer also shares the credits for BloggerCon and Weblogs.com followed by some web authoring tools, including OPML Editor, River2 aggregator, Fargo, Dropbox-based outliner, etc.

Personal Life

Currently, Winer is living in New York. In June 2002, Winer underwent life-saving bypass surgery and had to step down as CEO of UserLand. He has been working as a successful writer in Silicon Valley and is referred to as one of the most prolific content generators in the web history. In 2003, he worked as a fellow at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School and was the visiting scholar at NYU School of Journalism between 2010-12.

In 2002, he was named among the ‘InfoWorld Top Ten Technology Innovator’. In 2001, he was awarded the ‘Chosen Tech Renegade’ by Wired for work on SOAP with Microsoft.