A few years ago, a foundation ran a billboard campaign with an image of Kermit the Frog and the caption, "Eats Flies, Dates a Pig, Hollywood Star. Live Your Dreams." Beyond being a huge fan of the Muppet Show and its sardonic humor, especially as offered by Statler and Waldorf, I have always loved this billboard because it captures an essential element of human life, the desire to make a difference, to live life with the passion of commitment. It is a feeling Thoreau captured in Walden, to the enduring delight of secondary school English teachers across North America:
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
I was reflecting on this recently as the world lost two innovators in computing. About the first, Steve Jobs, much has been written, but far less about another pioneer of computing, Dennis Ritchie.
Remembering Ritchie
UNIX and C transformed our notions of operating systems and programming, seeding a cornucopia of software tools and technologies. I still have my dog-eared copy of the 1978 Bell Systems Technical Journal (BSTJ), which was devoted to the "UNIX Timesharing System."
I was a graduate student then, and it brought my first exposure to UNIX on a VAX 11/780 at Purdue. We ran VMS part of the time and UNIX the rest, largely because VMS had a decent FORTRAN compiler. The numerical analysts among us used FORTRAN, but for the rest, it was UNIX and C. It was a heady time, when new tools and approaches were transforming academic computing research from a largely theoretical discipline to an experimental science. I created a compiler for John Backus' FP language using lex and yacc on that VAX, and I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation using troff.
As da Vinci supposedly remarked, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." UNIX was elegant in its simplicity and functionality. It and the C language inspired multiple generations of hackers (and I use that word in its original, pure sense) to create so many things. It is not exaggeration to say that one can date operating systems as pre-UNIX and post-UNIX.
Richie's passing was not noted with great fanfare, but he made a difference. All of us in computing honor that.
Meditations on Dreams
In between the endless work deadlines, the email deluge and the frenzied travel, take a deep breath and ask yourself what matters and what you are doing. The answers may surprise you, particularly as mortality seems more than a tale told by the wise and aged to the young and uncertain. Those are the essential facts Thoreau described.
Throughout my life, I have been able to live many of my dreams. Far too many people are not so fortunate. (For the record, eating flies, dating a pig and being a Hollywood star have not been among them.) I have a few dreams left, both in computing and in life, and I suspect you do too. In my case, there is a book or two trying to escape via my fingers. (See Eudora, You Got the Love?)
Seize the opportunity. Live your dreams. Make a difference. It is all that any of us can hope to do.
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