Made a lot of sense, thanks for the writeup. Probably I am just silly for not understanding why our society doesn't cherish people who had so much more impact on our lives.
You can only cherish what you know. And knowing something takes effort, and even more effort the more obscure (as in hidden) the thing is. Now obscurity doesn't mean the thing is less important. A watches clockwork is obscured by it's face and it's hands, but without a clockwork, the watch would be useless.
But far more people will see the watch face than the clockwork (some watches expose it partially to show craftsmanship, but we hide it as well as we can). It's not that people wouldn't cherish the work of these men if they knew it ("Oh, Engelbart, he's the reason you see clickable pictures on your screen instead of a flashing cursor" "That's pretty cool, never heard of the guy before"), but they simply don't know them.
Really, if we want these men to be appreciated for their impact, it's us that have to go out and spread the word, because we're the only ones knowing that impact. If we're not ready for spreading that awareness (I don't think it's easy to do), then appreciation of the clockwork by watchmakers is what we'll have to be satisfied with.
Well, you can spin it that way, but trying to say that Apple had no impact on lives of many people would not be fair. And more importantly that impact was quite recent. iPod and ITMS early 2000, iPhone 2007, iPad 2013. Another point is, you can experience those products directly. You can see, touch and use them. Joe User does not see and touch C.
Yes, nobody denies the importance of C. But honestly, can you say what Ritchie was working on for the last 25 years?
The claim, that withous C we would be in the stone age of the computing is as credible as the claim, that without Jobs we would not have web, because it was developed on NeXT machine. And early Mac system was written in Pascal…
iPod came out in 2001, the iTunes Music Store was opened in 2003, iPad was released in 2010. I would also add iMac (1998) and WebKit (2003) to the list, as they too have had quite an impact on the market overall.
Because most people are obsessed with the popular kids at high school. Which I will wager you didn't understand either, or you wouldn't be commenting on HN :)
