Dave Hamilton @jedi_web_master - Twitter Profile

about 1 year ago

Did you play Donkey Kong at the arcades? I loved playing this at the arcades and then I got Donkey Kong on my Commodore 64 and it saved me a fortune in 20c coins. Ocean and Atarisoft both released C64 versions of Donkey Kong, I was partial to the Atarisoft game.

MuseumCommodore's tweet photo. Did you play Donkey Kong at the arcades?

I loved playing this at the arcades and then I got Donkey Kong on my Commodore 64 and it saved me a fortune in 20c coins.

Ocean and Atarisoft both released C64 versions of Donkey Kong, I was partial to the Atarisoft game. https://t.co/1wdr1oZ74m

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Jedi_Web_Master retweeted

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

4 days ago

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.

ihtesham2005's tweet photo. 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.

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Jedi_Web_Master retweeted

End Wokeness

@EndWokeness

3 days ago

Decay is a choice. DC before vs after:

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Jedi_Web_Master retweeted

Universal Orlando Resort @UniversalORL

2 days ago

Watching the sunset in Darkmoor >>>

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Who to follow

Back thanks to Elon Musk

Don Hodgson

@booomer9999

Jedi_Web_Master retweeted

CoveredGeekly

@CoveredGeekly

4 days ago

Happy 65th Birthday to Michael J. Fox 🎉

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Dave Hamilton

@Jedi_Web_Master

7 days ago

@MuseumCommodore They are Commodore Business Machines, they had 80 column screens as opposed to the 40 column screen on the PET. Good times.

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Jedi_Web_Master retweeted

Bridget in FL🌴

@BridgetKaneFL

8 days ago

Floridians balking at the abolishment of property taxes: Until we have this wasteful spending under control, we need to FIGHT FOR THIS AMENDMENT!! The only people who are against this are the ones benefiting from the wasteful spending. IT MUST STOP!! 🛑 👇👇👇👇👇👇👇👇

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Dave Hamilton

@Jedi_Web_Master

8 days ago

@Teslarati All the time, when I had it off in the Florida sun my MCU screen bubbled.

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Jedi_Web_Master retweeted

Commodore Computer Museum 🕹

@MuseumCommodore

9 days ago

On this day in 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan hit theaters and instantly became the greatest Star Trek movie ever made. Ricardo Montalbán’s Khan was the perfect villain against @WilliamShatner as Admiral James T. Kirk, the Genesis Device raised the stakes, and Spock’s sacrifice… well, we’re still not over it. Too soon! DID YOU SPOT IT? In Kirk’s apartment, right there in the background, sits a beautiful Silver Commodore PET computer — a perfect slice of 70s/80s tech in the 23rd century. (Kirk collected 20th Century artifacts) June 2017 Admiral Kirk's silver Commodore PET was sold for $6,000. What an incredible piece of Commodore / Star Trek history this computer is. Happy 44th anniversary to one of the most rewatchable sci-fi films of all time! Who’s watching the movie tonight as well?