The pace of technology
The passing of Steve Jobs and, the following week, Dennis Ritchie made me think about what they did and we all do in technology.
Usually you hear people say, and even complain, that technology changes too quickly. That what you get one day the next is obsolete. And you can argue that at some point that is true but it is mostly a marketing gimmick.
If you start to think of what Mr. Ritchie created you can’t be short of amazed. He created the programming language C and was part of the development team of Unix.
Those two tools are not only the building blocks of a lot of technologies, like Mac OS and Objective C (the language for iOS apps), but they are tools that are being used Today. Those projects have moved forward from what was the original versions, probably beyond recognition of the first version, but still keep the same structure and idea.
You can say the same thing about the windowed GUI for personal computers. It started in the Apple Lisa about 30 years ago and we still use the same concept. The look and finish are completely different but I am typing this in a window not a door, or a cube or a quantum space.
Basically you can say the same thing about hardware and software, the fit and finish change on every breathe but the underlying technologies are pretty much the same. In fact I believe that there is less focus these days in figuring out the deep end of the technology and there is an overrated bias towards the “revolutionary” applications that come and go.
