The death of a tech genius

SIR – There has been a lot of talk about the untimely death of Steve Jobs, the man who turned Apple around by designing products that became very popular (“A genius departs”, October 8th). The death of any person at the age of 56 is reason to lament, but Mr Jobs was just a businessman who knew his stuff and became very rich in the process.

Have you heard of Dennis Ritchie? He died a week after Mr Jobs, but was much more influential and significant. A salaried employee at Bell Laboratories throughout his working life, Mr Ritchie invented the C programming language and helped to create the Unix operating system.

The world of computing and the internet is unthinkable without C. No matter what great apps you come up with or what computing systems your company uses, the software which runs them was written in C, or was written in a language that was written in C. I hope, but do not expect, that you will put Dennis Ritchie’s picture on the cover of a forthcoming edition.

Alan McConnell Silver Spring, Maryland