coffee_rules Posted October 13, 2011 Posted October 13, 2011 I had a chance of meeting him personally about 2 months back ..RIP. What an amazing person! He's my family's bread-winner.
Anonymous Posted October 13, 2011 Posted October 13, 2011 universe god # kill `ps -ef | grep "Dennis Ritchie" | grep -v grep | awk ÃÃœprint $2}Ãà - shamelessly copied. Dennis Ritchie did not die - he was casted to void.... - me. I think he was free-d (P.S..and there goes my 1000th post..huff and puff)
MonishaSarabhai Posted October 13, 2011 Posted October 13, 2011 RIP this C and C++ were compulsory irrespective of our branch in FE. i remember writing so much rubbish between those 2 curly brackets and hoping for an output... any output. sigh
Holysmoke Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 RIP this C and C++ were compulsory irrespective of our branch in FE. i remember writing so much rubbish between those 2 curly brackets and hoping for an output... any output. sigh printf :facepalm:
The Outsider Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 BTW, is there an equivalent of the Nobel prize or Field's medal or Abel prize in Computer science?
akshayxyz Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 It would be very fitting tribute if someone can write an iterative quine in C - which does this: a) C code is written in form of an ASCII art - of portrait of DMR. b) when (a) is compiled and executed, it generates symbol "C" in form of ASCII art c) when (b) is compiled and executed, code (a) is generated. Something like this: http://www.digitalcraft.org/iloveyou/c_code.htm So, young blood - this is your opportunity to pay your tribute and get some fame too.
The Outsider Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 Turing Award. Thanks - I googled it and found that Ritchie shared the award with some Ken Thompson. His Wiki page is quite cryptic, if you know more can you share?
akshayxyz Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 Not sure what you want to know or whether following answers it. Allan Turing is known as Father of Theoretical Computer Science. Computer Science owes it to him the way we know CS. Back then there was no such thing as computer science as we know it today. In fact, he was a mathematician, logician, crypt-analyst..It is a good read how he played a significant role in WWII - by deciphering German crypted messages, w/o which WWII could have gone some other way. And that some Ken Thompson is co-creator of UNIX along with Dennis Ritchie. These days it is rather easier/trivial to write a basic OS from scratch or modify an existing one. Writing an OS requires a stable programming language, and a programming language needs stable OS, compiler etc. to be used on. An almost chicken-egg condition. Those days, the very building blocks of programming languages, OS, algorithms were not as matured as they are today. So, what these guys did - wrote their own OS and programming language, then modified programming language as required, and went through the iterations many times over - before it took the shape as we know today. Evolution of Multics -to->Unix, C from B, is primarily these guy's work. If there were no C and/or UNIX, the computing world would be very different from what it is today. Most of the mainstream procedural programming languages owe it to C, and almost all of OS's basic building blocks owe it to UNIX - that includes Windows/MAC. Whatever I write here would be just rambling and scratching not even thinnest layer of CS surface.. best is to read about these guys/specific-topics individually. Donald Knuth (god of analysis of algorithms) is another giant of programming part of CS.
Vijay.Sharma Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 One mystery I still can't understand is how the hell does data get stored in a computer. Yeah bits and bytes is fine...but is there any physicality to it, and if so, what determines it especially given that these days we are able to store exponential amount of data in exponentially smaller physical sizes of matter. Can anyone please explain this...sorry for my duh-ness
punjabi_khota Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 One mystery I still can't understand is how the hell does data get stored in a computer. Yeah bits and bytes is fine...but is there any physicality to it' date= and if so, what determines it especially given that these days we are able to store exponential amount of data in exponentially smaller physical sizes of matter. Can anyone please explain this...sorry for my duh-ness :hysterical::hysterical::hysterical: No there is no physicality. It is all illusion.
akshayxyz Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 One mystery I still can't understand is how the hell does data get stored in a computer. Yeah bits and bytes is fine...but is there any physicality to it' date=' and if so, what determines it especially given that these days we are able to store exponential amount of data in exponentially smaller physical sizes of matter. Can anyone please explain this...sorry for my duh-ness[/quote'] Any information/data can be represented in terms of sequence of '0's and '1's. So, if you can have a medium where you can mark 0s and 1s and then read them back - you can store/retrieve any data. To start with. I would suggest reading about 'punched-cards' - that will give some idea about how digital information is stored - conceptually. After that its basically about what indicates 'hole'/bits on your storage media and making those 'holes'/bits denser and denser. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_data_storage
akshayxyz Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 As for the physicality part - it is as physical as communicating via sign language or writing your name on rice grain etc.
ganeshran Posted October 14, 2011 Author Posted October 14, 2011 Physicality depends on media, it is the bump and depression in optical media, platter in HDD etc
Vijay.Sharma Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 Akki, Ganesh, thanks for your responses. So basically if I am understanding this right, the density of markings (switches?) on a material decides the amount of data that can be stored on that material. Therefore it follows that the more precise the switches(?) are the more data can be stored in a unit size of the material. And the main difference in technology that has enabled increasingly greater amounts of data to be stored in the same unit size of material is precision engineering (of course add to it new materials)? One more question - these switches are all electrical as in electricity based switches or can they be of any other type like say light or sound energy switches?
akshayxyz Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/14/technology/dennis-ritchie-programming-trailblazer-dies-at-70.html?_r=1 nytimes obituary for DMR.
coffee_rules Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 concepts of data storage has been the same, but the technology has leaped in the last 10 years.
akshayxyz Posted October 14, 2011 Posted October 14, 2011 Akki, Ganesh, thanks for your responses. So basically if I am understanding this right, the density of markings (switches?) on a material decides the amount of data that can be stored on that material. Therefore it follows that the more precise the switches(?) are the more data can be stored in a unit size of the material. And the main difference in technology that has enabled increasingly greater amounts of data to be stored in the same unit size of material is precision engineering (of course add to it new materials)? pretty much yes. One more question - these switches are all electrical as in electricity based switches or can they be of any other type like say light or sound energy switches? [my hardware knowledge at levels of transistors etc. is extremely limited, some electronic/electrical engineer would answer it better] I am not sure what you mean by electrical switches. In fact, if you use common sense, you would realize that CDROM/DVDs do not need constant electrical supply, and yet it stores data - in forms of bumps (at micro level). Energy/states/symbols in nature are inherently analogue - whereas digital information requires to be written/read in form of 1s and 0s. Even an electrical signal is analogue and has to be digitized by cut-off voltages. And sound is even more difficult (inefficient) to convert to/from digital form. SONAR/ultrasound works based on sound waves, which is analogue method to 'read' information - but I do not know of a way to use sound/radio-waves in storing information. And if you realize how grainy/blurry Ultrasound images are (of something, which you can see very clearly, if we have direct visual) - then you would know how inefficient it would be to read/write using sound waves. Wavelengths of sound waves are of the order of meters in air (smallest around mms), so two distinguishable bits have to be at least that far apart to be read accurately using sound. And w/o air, the reading head will have to be in perfect contact with the storage medium - and that would mean friction. If I my understanding is right, closest analogy you can see are old style vinyl storage records, where the reading head would read music off the storage media in form of vibrations. Btw, future of information storage/retrieval lies in reading/writing quantum states. What have you made me write :((
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