
Remembering the Creator of Steve Jobs, Linus Torvalds and Bill Gates - caspervonb
https://medium.com/commitlog/in-memory-of-dennis-ritchie-f8e4118bb19b
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eesmith
That subtitle - "The Creator of Steve Jobs ... and Bill Gates" \- doesn't seem
to make historical sense.

Unix had very little influence in the early part of Jobs' and Gates' careers,
and the article doesn't give any substance to that connection.

The original Apple and Apple2 didn't have anything Unix-like. I think the
earliest connection to Unix would have been with the Apple Lisa.

Microsoft's Altair BASIC also had no basis in Unix. It was developed on a
PDP-10, and the BASIC language predates Unix.

The MS-DOS heritage through CP/M might include some Unix, but that wasn't part
of the creation of Gates, and as Wikipedia notes:

> CP/M's command-line interface was patterned after the operating systems from
> Digital Equipment, such as RT-11 for the PDP-11 and OS/8 for the PDP-8.

Unix was written first for the PDP-7 then for the PDP-11, so has a shared
heritage.

~~~
pnako
Good point. Linus also learned programming with BASIC. So that's really the
thing in common between Steve, Bill and Linus.

