Inductee Dennis Ritchie, Who Invented Unix, Transformed Technology
Inductee Ken Thompson and the History of C Programming Language
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I was just remembering the other day having lunch with Paul Terry in Oct 2011. Paul was VP R&D at Abatis (I worked under him) [1998-2000], and is now cofounder and CEO of Photonic (another Canadian 
startup). At lunch, he asked me a quiz question : “who of import has died recently?” I answered John McCarthy (computer scientist) and he mentioned Dennis Ritchie. I think there was someone else in addition that I answered, but now I can’t remember who. If the lunch was after Steve Jobs died then it would have been Steve --as Steve died in Oct '11 too.
I think I allude to that that conversation with Paul Terry in my Cognitive Productivity: Using Knowledge to Become Profoundly Effective book. In that conversation Paul mentioned that some companies win by changing the rules of the game. That’s how Apple beat RIM for instance. With Hookmark, CogSci Apps has changed the rules of information retrieval, as you can tell from our new home page (changed a bit, more changes to come). That and some upcoming events will , we expect, help the world to understand the rules have changed.