Joe Bidenthe president of the united states announced the names 17 people to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, an award created by John F. Kennedy to recognize those who have made exemplary contributions to the nation’s security and/or interests. Among the names mentioned is Steve Jobsthe well-known co-founder of Apple and the face of the company for decades until his death in 2011.
Since Steve Jobs has passed away, all indications are that his family will receive the award. The White House explained this through an official statement “Steve Jobs (died 2011) was the co-founder, CEO and chairman of Apple, Inc., CEO of Pixar, and held a senior position at the Walt Disney Company. His vision, imagination and creativity led to inventions that changed and continue to change the way the world communicates, as well as transforming the computer, music, film and wireless industries.”.
Steve Jobs is not the only internationally known personality among Joe Biden’s awardees, as they include gymnast Simone Biles, ex-soldier and former civil servant John McCain (died in 2018), soccer player Megan Rapinoe and well-known actor Denzel Washington.
What about Dennis Ritchie and others?
Regardless of whether the recognition of Steve Jobs is deserved or not, there were not a few who claimed ten years ago the figure of Dennis Ritchie, much less known and publicized, but undoubtedly much more decisive for computing as we know it. today.
For those who don’t know Dennis Ritchie, along with Ken Thompson, is considered the father of Unix, which laid the foundation for how modern operating systems (even the latest ones) work. It is also considered to be creator of the C programming languagewhich is still widely used in the development of operating systems today and whose syntax has been imitated by a number of other languages including Java, C# and JavaScript (yes, it was not the first programming language).
In short, without Dennis Ritchie and of course the other people who helped him in his work (among them the aforementioned Ken Thompson), computing would have taken very different paths, and who knows if it had gone another way, home computing might not have gone . had the same move.
Dennis Ritchie wasn’t someone to be adored by a group of geeks out of anonymity, but he won some very important awards during his career. However, the last one he received, or at least the last in his field, was the Japanese prize in early 2011, a few months before his death. Actually, Dennis Ritchie died on October 12, 2011, just one week after Steve JobsSome have therefore argued his character against that of Apple’s co-founder.
This is not to start a debate about whether Steve Jobs individually deserves all the credit he has received, but to try to establish some meritocratic criteria for other important people in computing to receive it, but it is clear that the media spectrum for these questions too much.
Aside from the debates sparked by the closed nature of Apple’s ecosystem, this is undeniable Steve Jobs was a titan of design and quality standardsand his abilities were more than proven when he returned to the company with a bitten apple in 1997 (following the acquisition of NeXT) and managed to put it back on top.
