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Outside the tech world, everyone talks about public figures like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Sam Altman, and others. However, those in IT or with CS background know that people like Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Alan Turing, researchers and mathematician are the ones who truly built this industry. Sadly, they don't get enough credit or movies. People these days worship grifters and I think it is really sad.
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wraptile

I'd go further and say that there are no magic developers in general. Most technology would be discovered by someone else and co-operation and sharing is much more admirable than personality empire building.
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synlogic

I get your point. but I'm uncomfortable hitting 'Like' on a post where someone calls Steve Jobs a grifter. one of the two literal founders of Apple and a man who had a massive impact on the course of the development of the computer industry. his skills were a perfect compliment to Woz. right man, right time. was he a perfect being in all possible ways? heck no, but who is?
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Sydney / Prophet ๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€โšง๏ธ๐Ÿด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ

Ken Thompson's paper "Reflection's on Trusting Trust" made me want to burn my computer and live in the woods, So I give him credit for the fact I've slowly become less and less reliant on Technology compared to what I used to be.
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ChakSoft

the problem is that we are taught to worship grifters. Look at school books, they'll all say Edison invented the lightbulb. No mention of Lindsay or Swann. Never ever. Same thing for Nikola Tesla...

Great inventors are geniuses with great ideas, but they are poor marketers. The grifters are just great marketing people, exceptionnally good at stealing ideas and filing patents before real inventors do and making very big money with them.

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Gemma โญ๏ธ๐Ÿ”ฐ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ ๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ญ ๐ŸŽ

Steve Jobs was truly an asshole, but putting him in the same category as Elon Musk and Sam Altman is unwarranted.

Jobs understood and cared about design, user experience, and quality in ways that no one else in the industry was willing to promote. The state of computing today would be immeasurably worse without those qualities.

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JohnMashey

If you haven't already done so recently, visit the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
Also, peruse the Oral Histories:
computerhistory.org/collectionโ€ฆ
I'd done a few interviews, including of old colleagues: got Ken to talk about computer chess, sadly didn't catch Dennis before he died, did visit Princeton to get Brian Kernighan.

Oral history - Search catalog - Online collections - CHM

www.computerhistory.org
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