Category: RIP

When the U.S. Department of Justice proved victorious in its historic antitrust suit against AT&T, breaking up what had been the world’s largest corporation in 1984, the feds promised a report every three years to document changes in telecommunications. The first was due in 1987.

But in 1986, with only a year to the deadline, the DOJ was stuck: no team in the U.S. government had the expertise to understand the complexity of this enormous, changing marketplace. A slew of consulting firms was there for hire, but they had all worked for AT&T. So the DOJ gave up on the experts and hired one man who had never studied the communications sector.

Peter Huber had no conflicts and started from scratch. The Geodesic Network: 1987 Report on Competition in the Telephone Industry, later cited widely as “the massive Huber report,” became a runaway bestseller for the Government Printing Office. The report brilliantly detailed how technologies of freedom were primed to crush old monopolies with disruptions at the network’s “edge”—personal computers, software, devices—if policymakers would lean back. The 450-page, data-dense thesis was delivered to the DOJ in 11 months; weeks early, as that was all the time Huber needed to go from zero to the world’s leading authority on perhaps the most complicated public policy issue yet invented.

Source: The Magical Genius of Peter Huber – Reason.com

When I arrived from the airport on my last visit, he saw sticking out of my luggage a small book. He held out his hand for it — Peter Ackroyd’s “London Under,” a subterranean history of the city. Then we began a 10-minute celebration of its author. We had never spoken of him before, and Christopher seemed to have read everything. Only then did we say hello. He wanted the Ackroyd, he said, because it was small and didn’t hurt his wrist to hold. But soon he was making penciled notes in its margins. By that evening he’d finished it. He could have written a review, but he was to turn in a long piece on Chesterton.
And so this was how it would go: talk about books and politics, then he dozed while I read or wrote, then more talk, then we both read. The intensive care unit room was crammed with flickering machines and sustaining tubes, but they seemed almost decorative. Books, journalism, the ideas behind both, conquered the sterile space, or warmed it, they raised it to the condition of a good university library. And they protected us from the bleak high-rise view through the plate glass windows, of that world, in Larkin’s lines, whose loves and chances “are beyond the stretch/Of any hand from here!”
via Christopher Hitchens, Consummate Writer, Brilliant Friend – NYTimes.com.

“When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is,” says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs.
On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn’t quite do justice to Ritchie’s sweeping influence on the modern world. Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language, and with fellow Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson, he used C to build UNIX, the operating system that so much of the world is built on — including the Apple empire overseen by Steve Jobs.
“Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX,” Pike tells Wired. “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.
“It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did.”
via Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com.