The world has lost three big tech-giants in this month of October.All of them were pioneer on their own areas.
First of all, On October 5, 2011, around 3:00 p.m., Steve Jobs died at his home in Palo Alto, California. He was co-founder, chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc. When I look for words to introduce Steve Jobs, I can’t ignore the precise words used by Barack Obama on the passing of Jobs.
Here are what Obama said:
"Steve was among the greatest of American innovators - brave enough to think differently, bold enough to believe he could change the world, and talented enough to do it. By building one of the planet’s most successful companies from his garage, he exemplified the spirit of American ingenuity. By making computers personal and putting the internet in our pockets, he made the information revolution not only accessible, but intuitive and fun. And by turning his talents to storytelling, he has brought joy to millions of children and grownups alike. Steve was fond of saying that he lived every day like it was his last. Because he did, he transformed our lives, redefined entire industries, and achieved one of the rarest feats in human history: he changed the way each of us sees the world.The world has lost a visionary. And there may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented."
There was a big outcry on the passing of Jobs, but the rest two tech-giants went away very quietly.
On October 12, we lost Dennis Ritchie, who created C Programing Language, Most modern computer languages like C++, Objective C and C# are the descendants of C. Even presently popular language JAVA also owes to Ritchi’s invention. It has changed the way of creating software programs.
And with his colleague, Ken Thompson, he developed UNIX operating system which established concepts and principles that are the precepts of computing today. UNIX was the forebear of LINUX which actually was a reinvention of UNIX for the internet age. UNIX-like systems are being used on millions of Apple and Android devices.
Rob Pike, a programming legend and current Googler said to an American online magazine named wired: "Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernel — that pretty much 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. And all of the network hardware running these programs I can almost guarantee were written in C."
“Even Windows was once written in C and UNIX underpins both Mac OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, and iOS, which runs the iPhone and the iPad."
"Jobs was the king of the visible, and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible," says Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
And at the last week of this month, on October 25, John McCarthy, Stanford University emeritus professor of computer science, died on his home at Stanford aged 84. He came up with the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1955 and became known as the father of Artificial Intelligence (which he called a science and engineering of making intelligent machines. )
The following information were found in Wikipedia on A.I. : “In fiction, Artificial Intelligence has appeared fulfilling many roles, including a servant (R2D2 in Star Wars), a law enforcer (K.I.T.T. "Knight Rider"), a comrade (Lt. Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation), a conqueror/overlord (The Matrix), a dictator (With Folded Hands), a benevolent provider/de facto ruler (The Culture), an assassin (Terminator), a sentient race (Battlestar Galactica/Transformers), an extension to human abilities (Ghost in the Shell) and the savior of the human race (R. Daneel Olivaw in the Asimov's Robot Series).”
“Robot designer Hans Moravec, cyberneticist Kevin Warwick and inventor Ray Kurzweil have predicted that humans and machines will merge in the future into cyborgs that are more capable and powerful than either.”
McCarthy also created LISP, the standard programming language used not only in robotics and other scientific applications but in a multitude of Internet-based services, from credit-card fraud detection to airline scheduling.
McCarthy is also credited with developing an early form of time-sharing. His colleague Lester Earnest told the Los Angeles Times: "The Internet would not have happened nearly as soon as it did except for the fact that John initiated the development of time-sharing systems. We keep inventing new names for time-sharing. It came to be called servers.… Now we call it cloud computing. That is still just time-sharing. John started it."
I, being a student of information and communication technology, mourn on the death of these pioneers and thus getting inspiration to continue their work to advance humanity through the development in the field of ICT.
Dhaka থেকে sumon লিখেছেন,
