And every time there's an article about Steve Jobs someone posts this comment as if they are the first/only person to think of it. It came up many times at the time they passed.
It's obvious why Steve Jobs gets more mainstream attention; he was the face of a company that has a daily presence in millions of people's lives.
Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy are not known for the same reason that Georges Friedel (or anyone else involved in the development of LCDs) is not known. Poeple aren't interested in engineers, and engineers aren't usually interested in being public figures.
The list of engineers and scientists whose contributions were absolutely fundamental and necessary to the existence of an iPhone is literally thousands of people. Do you really expect everyone to know all these names? No.
You know Ritchie and McCarthy because you are interested in programming and UNIX. A chemical engineer would know someone else that you don't know. Your knowledge is not superior to someone else's. It's what you're interested in vs. what they are interested in.
Come on, this is obvious. Why do otherwise smart people think this is a good question?
Fundamental technology and science advances can touch a lot of people, and even tech-savvy people may be ignorant of the inventors. This is perhaps too bad, but totally understandable. It's a big world.
I'm specifically thinking about Nobel prizewinners in Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine since, say, 1950. That's over 200 people and I'll bet most tech-savvy people know only a small fraction. Yet, those discoveries are hugely influential. (As one specific example, say, Lauterbur and Mansfield who won the 2003 Nobel for their work in the 1980s on magnetic resonance imaging.)
It can be very humbling to speak with a person who knows some of this history. I sat in on a class in the physics of sensing technologies, and at the beginning, the professor listed the Nobel prizes pertinent to MRI, PET, CT, radar, spectroscopy, etc. It was a long list of people unknown to the public, and, alas, unknown to me as well. It's always going to be this way.
It's obvious why Steve Jobs gets more mainstream attention; he was the face of a company that has a daily presence in millions of people's lives.
Dennis Ritchie and John McCarthy are not known for the same reason that Georges Friedel (or anyone else involved in the development of LCDs) is not known. Poeple aren't interested in engineers, and engineers aren't usually interested in being public figures.
The list of engineers and scientists whose contributions were absolutely fundamental and necessary to the existence of an iPhone is literally thousands of people. Do you really expect everyone to know all these names? No.
You know Ritchie and McCarthy because you are interested in programming and UNIX. A chemical engineer would know someone else that you don't know. Your knowledge is not superior to someone else's. It's what you're interested in vs. what they are interested in.
Come on, this is obvious. Why do otherwise smart people think this is a good question?