Quote:
Originally Posted by wodin
X-windows and its derivative Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)s were probably the best thing that ever happened to computer evolution. They both drove hardware development and made computing available to the unwashed masses, who were generally incapable of understanding command line interfaces.
Ken Thompson was either very short sighted or was very afraid for his status in geekdom. I'd vote for short sighted.
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Ken Thompson, short sighted? No, it's because of that specific time in which he spoke those words. At that time, a program was very 'simple':
You put stuff in it. The program does something with it, and it puts stuff out. In doing so, it solved a problem. If a program didn't do this, it was useless and wasteful of computing resources. Yes, a GUI solved the problem of lack of userfriendlyness, but it didn't solve stuff like 'what is the result of adding 2 and 5?", and thus it wasn't deemed necessary.
That man did not just use a computer. He defined computers as we know them today. (And chess computers/programs as well.) He developed an operating system (Unix), 45 years ago, that is either still in use today, has descendants that are in use, or have been cloned/based on said stuff.
If someone in the computer industry should attain god status, then it would be Ken Thompson; and his colleague Dennis Ritchie as well. And Brian Kerningham would make a nice demi-god.
Every operating system in (meaningful) use today is a Unix/Unix-like, except for Windows... and ironically, it has been moving into Unix territory for the last 10 years, with a more powerful command-line, detaching of the user interface (for the new Windows 10 Core), and detaching some of the more user-centric sub-systems so they don't need to be installed on a server.