William Lowe

William Lowe has died aged 72. You may not have heard of him, but you will have heard of the product he developed.

In 1980 Lowe was working for IBM in Florida. Seeing a gap in the market, he persuaded IBM management to let a small team of a dozen people create a personal computer. He thought it was vital for the team to be free of the rigorous controls and corporate culture the company mandated for projects.

IBM reluctantly agreed. The company had tried twice before to make a personal computer, and each project had ended in failure. Lowe's small tiger team succeeded in creating what is now known as the IBM PC.

For speed, they decide to buy an operating system, eventually settling on one from a small company run by a certain Bill Gates. For speed, they decided to use components from companies outside of IBM, such as Intel's 8088 processor. Lowe also decided that the new computer would have an open architecture, allowing the user to expand it. Again, this was contrary to IBM practice.

These decisions made it feasible for other companies to make computers that ran the same software, enabling the entire IBM PC-compatible industry. In my mind Lowe's decision to break away from IBM corporate culture was one of the defining moments in the computer industry. In this, he was far more influential than even Steve Jobs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24725678

RIP.

Dennis Ritchie, RIP

With the media obsessing over the sad news of Steve Jobs's death, the passing of a man who had much more of an effect on the computer industry has gone virtually unnoticed.

You will certainly not have heard of Dennis Ritchie. His was not a household name, and he was not eulogised in the same way as Jobs. Yet he undoubtedly altered the world. I first heard of him when learning the programming language, 'C'. The bible on the earliest incarnations of the language was known colloquially as 'K&R'. As you may have guessed, the 'R' refers to Ritchie, who co-authored the book with fellow engineer Brian Kernighan.

Ritchie created the C programming language whilst working at Bell Labs in the early 1970s and, later, co-wrote the Unix operating system with Ken Thompson. C and its successor C++ are two of the most popular programming languages in use today, and Unix is used in a massive number of devices (even Apple's computers are based upon it).

Both inventions are far from flawless. They were created in the 1970s, when the computing world was very different. The C programming language is particularly flawed, and its extreme flexibility makes it difficult to write secure software. Yet that same flexibility led to its success, whilst many other technically superior languages have come and gone.

Someone once told me: "Anyone can program in Java, but C is for real men". If that is true, then Ritchie was a God.

The Register had a good obituary of the great man.

RIP Dennis Ritchie, and thank you.