Fernstedt Anders

Swangali etc. 🦢Old school newsman trained at Bell Labs. 2 Rutland Gate SW7 ☦️🚲🪩🚲☦️

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

It’s as easy as it seems. Leave behind your yesterdays and your tomorrows and taste friendship. (Almond croissant 🥐 the adjacent solvent, eagerly received by all life, ratcatcher cribsnatcher Herons included).

https://t.co/pgQrTwkhvx

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@uaustinorg Duh.

[Adrenalin Patlaması @adrenaIinIendnz]

İçindeki denizci ruhunu uyandırdı.

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

The Book of Ezra…

… by Eustace Mullins (1961)

“A Hoot About the Ploot” worthy of @elonmusk’s attention? And yours?

https://t.co/F1kJlchHDr

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@paul_jkrause Ezra Pound’s most notorious protégé?

https://t.co/RjbNlZ4WRD

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@paul_jkrause Ezra Pound’s most notorious protégé?

https://t.co/RjbNlZ4WRD

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@JamesWHankins1 https://t.co/fUJN9iDUsh

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@QuasLacrimas Baltasar Gracián (born 1601) carried the courtier mien to its apex?

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@QuasLacrimas Baltasar Gracián (born 1601) carried the courtier mien to its apex?

[The Chivalry Guild @ChivalryGuild]

Baltasar Gracian writing in the 17th century on what some would today call "frame":

"’Tis a great aim of prudence never to be embarrassed. It is the sign of a real man, of a noble heart, for magnanimity is not easily put out. The passions are the humours of the soul, and every excess in them weakens prudence; if they overflow through the mouth, the reputation will be in danger. Let a man therefore be so much and so great a master over himself that neither in the most fortunate nor in the most adverse circumstances can anything cause his reputation injury by disturbing his self-possession, but rather enhance it by showing his superiority."

[SaveOurChurchesUK @SaveukChurches]

St Peter's Chapel, Bradwell was built in 654.

Not just before the Norman Conquest. Before England itself. 🇬🇧

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@Britains___Pubs Echo that.

Hogs & Heifers, NYC Meatpacking District, late 1990’s https://t.co/2t9JMSInfU bubble era.

[BUFFALO SPONKS: Queen of Yarnia @FlowersAgainst]

@roccitycyclecam Hogs n Heifers, when it was in the meatpacking district 😆

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@RupertLowe10 Please also prosecute officials and politicians who knowingly allow dangerous native citizens in our communities to burglar & cuckoo FOR OVER A YEAR “vulnerable homeless” neighbours taken off the streets via housing paid for by London councils.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

Dennis Ritchie invented C in 1972, co-built Unix in 1969, and his code is running inside every device you are reading this on right now and the colleague who announced his death had to do it through a Google+ post because no journalist thought to check.

He worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey for 44 years. He never gave a keynote. He never ran a company. He never appeared on a magazine cover. He just wrote code that became the invisible foundation everything else is built on.

Here is what he actually built, and why it matters more than almost anything that happened in tech.

In 1969, Bell Labs had just walked away from one of the most ambitious computing projects in history. The Multics project, a joint effort between MIT, Bell Labs, and General Electric, had collapsed under its own weight. Too complex. Too expensive. Too slow. Bell Labs pulled out.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie refused to let the ideas die.

Working in a small office in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix in three weeks during the summer of 1969. One week for the file system. One week for the process management. One week for the command shell. Ritchie was working alongside him, and when the system needed a language that could express what they were building, he built one.

In 1972 he completed C.

C was not just another programming language. It was a different philosophy about what a programming language should be. Before C, most systems code was written in assembly, which meant every program was tied to the specific hardware it ran on. You could not move code between machines. You rewrote it from scratch every time.

C changed that. It sat close enough to the hardware to be fast, but abstract enough to run on anything. When Thompson rewrote the Unix kernel in C in 1973, it became the first operating system that could be picked up and moved to a completely different machine without starting over. Portability was a new idea. Ritchie made it real.

The branching that followed is almost impossible to overstate.

Unix spread from Bell Labs to universities. At Berkeley, it became BSD. BSD became the foundation of macOS and iOS. Unix influenced Linus Torvalds, who built Linux in 1991. Linux now runs every Android phone, every major web server, every supercomputer on the Top500 list, and the overwhelming majority of cloud infrastructure at AWS, Google, and Microsoft.

C became the parent language of C++, Java, JavaScript, Python, and Objective-C. Rob Pike, who worked across the hall from Ritchie at Bell Labs for 20 years, said it plainly: "The browsers are written in C. The Unix kernel that the entire internet runs on is written in C. Web servers are written in C, and if they're not, they're written in Java or C++, which are C derivatives, or Python or Ruby, which are implemented in C."

Ritchie won the Turing Award in 1983. He won the National Medal of Technology in 1998, presented by President Clinton. He was head of System Software Research at Bell Labs for decades.

He answered emails from strangers with technical questions until the end of his life. His home address stayed listed in the phone book. His colleague Brian Kernighan, who co-authored the definitive C textbook with him, said Ritchie was a private person who did no self-salesmanship. That was not false modesty. It was just who he was.

He died on October 12, 2011, at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was 70. He had been ill for some time. The world did not notice until Rob Pike posted a quiet announcement on Google+, and the news spread through the programming community in hushed tones.

No front pages. No tributes from heads of state. No candlelight vigils outside corporate campuses.

The device you are reading this on runs code that traces directly back to what he built. So does the server that delivered it to you. So does the browser or app you opened to get here.

Most people will never know his name.

The ones who built everything you use every day do.

[Palash @ABiggerSpalash]

Geoff Hinton, before he was Geoff Hinton, once asked NVIDIA for a free GPU for his students Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. Nvidia declined

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@paul_jkrause https://t.co/RoAORSuveD

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@PhysInHistory Copyright?©️

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

The philosophy entrance exam to ENS, France's most selective school and the one with the most Nobel Prizes per student worldwide.

This year's subject: "The authority of science." 6 hours. Handwritten.

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@TodayinHistory An icon of my name saint ☦️

Pentecost Feast celebration today at https://t.co/AYJteEf2SX 💐

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@TodayinHistory An icon of my name saint ☦️

Pentecost Feast celebration today at https://t.co/AYJteEf2SX 💐

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@curiouswavefn Google AI’s riff on Freeman Dyson… builder or destroyer? 👇

https://t.co/gdaPqZI9kC

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@curiouswavefn Dyson… builder or destroyer, that is the question. It takes more than paradox to end up titling your midlife/midwife autobiography “Disturbing the Universe”.

Add to that the highly classified 50’s “Saturn by ‘70” nuclear propulsion space rocket he co-designed at General Atomic?

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@xThen_Now @InterestingSTEM Better now when even pearls are thrown in the trash

[Fernstedt Anders @fernstedt]

@Babygravy9 Cutting through grandpa’s signature boiled ox tongue in the late seventies, the knife once caught an oversized lead munition. Haven’t bitten a bullet since.