The thing about Richie, which as human factors people, we should all aspire to is both the longevity and practicality, the aspiration and the pragmatism, of the work – Even when Bell / AT&T removed the funding for the project – they just built it anyway and released it publicly to non-commercial interests. This is the kind of ethos I wish to cultivate and the ethos I aspire to have.

In the mass outpouring that that has greeted the untimely death of Steve Jobs, another computing luminary, Dennis Ritchie, died the other week. It seems to me that while Steve Jobs is best known, Dennis Ritchie has had most influence on a generation of computer scientists and therefore implicitly on every user of technology – the difference is that these users just don’t know it!

Now I’m in danger of believing that ‘everything’ is human factors, I might say that Richie developed UNIX to address the usability issues of the underlying machine code, I might also say that ‘c’ was developed to enable applications to be more easily coded and more efficiently moved to different platforms; all usability issues.

The thing about Richie, which as human factors people, we should all aspire to is both the longevity and practicality, the aspiration and the pragmatism, of the work – Even when Bell / AT&T removed the funding for the project – they just built it anyway and released it publicly to non-commercial interests. This is the kind of ethos I wish to cultivate and the ethos I aspire to have.