Dennis Ritchie

I’ve always appreciated the tag line of Google Scholar: “Stand on the shoulders of giants”. Google itself is a giant in its own right. Yet the tagline helps remind us that the real giants behind the technological successes we all enjoy today are the original researchers whose discoveries and inventions have paved the way for Google and others to achieve their current heights.

October 2011 has become an unprecedented month for the tech industry. Within the space of a week or so  it has lost some of its most significant giants. These events have not gone by unnoticed. Many users who turned to Twitter when they heard about Steve Jobs’ passing got the “Fail Whale” instead of tweet streams. The enormous  attention his death has attracted is not at all surprising. Steve Jobs was indeed a giant who had a profound impact on all of us, whether you use Apple products or not.  It’s important to realize that Job’s impact transcends the current generation of iPhones and iPads.  He has taught us perhaps more than any one else, what constitutes a truly excellent technology product. By raising the bar in this way, he has done everybody a favor – his fans, his competitors, and even those of you still living on the dark side with your Windows computers.

However, the tech industry has also lost a couple of other notable giants in recent days that have garnered far less attention. Nevertheless, these individuals have also made enormous contributions and are responsible in part for creating the stage onto which Steve Jobs climbed many years later.

For us computer science junkies, Dennis Ritchie was the “R” in the classic “K & R” C book that many of us learned to program from. He not only was the creator of the C programming language but also made significant contributions to the development of the UNIX operating system. C and UNIX became more and more influential over time.  Adoption of these technologies began in the academic setting as AT&T gave UNIX away to universities.  It is interesting to note that some years later, Apple computers also followed a similar path to success with an early focus on the education market.  Today, almost every computer and smartphone embodies UNIX/C and/or the successors inspired by UNIX/C. For example, your iPhone is running Apple’s UNIX-based operating system, and the apps you have installed have been written in Objective C – a language based on C that was extended with object-oriented syntax. The 190 million Android smartphones Larry Page mentioned yesterday are all running Linux – an open source implementation of a UNIX-like operating system. The Linux kernel is written in C as are many of the lower level libraries and framework. Though Android apps are written in the popular Java programming language, Java’s C pedigree is also evident to programmers familiar with both languages.

Robert Galvin

Another tech industry giant who passed quietly from the scene this week is Bob Galvin, the man who led Motorola from being a car radio manufacturer to the wireless communication giant that played a large part in creating the modern mobile industry. Bob Galvin, the son of the original Motorola founder, Paul Galvin was every bit the quality obsessed visionary that Steve Job was in his own day.  Galvin actually retired before my time at Motorola, though he was still active in the company when I first started in the early 1990′s. I recall actually meeting him on one occasion. Shortly after I joined the company my supervisor (Allan Willey) took me along with him to a meeting involving our CEO (Gary Tooker at the time). In the course of the meeting I noticed a person who I thought was unusually old sitting off to the side and looking rather bored. During a coffee break I casually asked Allan who the “old man” in the corner was and I remember him furiously whispering back “Shhh, that old man is Bob Galvin – chairman of the Board!”  Though I did not initially recognize who Bob was when I saw him, I had been around Motorola long enough by then to realize that Bob Galvin was “the man” and held in extremely high regard by everyone.   I heard many stories from my older colleagues about Bob which clearly indicated he was a man with great character and vision.  He cared not just about the bottom line, but also the people who worked for him.  Later when his son Chris became our CEO I felt some of those traits were passed down to the younger generation as well.  Though I had very limited interaction with Chris, I do remember him coming by each year to our annual innovation fairs and spending a significant amount of time with those of us in research, taking in our technology prototypes, and interacting with us on a technical level.  From my perspective he clearly understood the business, the technology, and really appreciated the technical people who it happen. In any case, without the early pioneering leadership of visionaries like Bob Galvin, there would not be a mobile industry today.

So what can we learn from these recent events? Obviously, the passing of others reminds us of our own mortality in a personal way. The death of anyone, famous or unknown should always give us pause and encourage us to spend time thinking about the deeper issues in life and death, why are we here, how much time do we have left, and what ought our priorities be? Time is a precious resource, and ought to be used as such (I hope my CS students have made it this far in my post…).

Another thing these particular events should remind us of is that behind every high profile success, there are likely a number of prerequisite contributions made earlier by other lesser known but no less important individuals. When possible, in the CS courses I teach I try to help my students develop a historical perspective on the subject we are studying.  Every technology has its pedigree and I have observed that the student will appreciate and learn it more readily if they understand something of the minds and circumstances that gave it shape. For example, in the undergraduate systems programming course I teach, in my intro lecture I have a view graph on Dennis Ritchie, Ada Lovelace and others who historically have played an important role in programming as we know and practice it today.

Finally, these events should remind us to thank God daily for giving us a sufficient supply of amazingly gifted people like Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie, and Bob Galvin, so that the rest of us have the shoulders we need to stand on!

When I recently returned to my roots here at GVSU, I not only had to an assimilate an amazingly altered campus from what I left behind back in 1988, but I also had to get accustomed to the fact that GVSU now sprawls across the entire W. Michigan area. In addition to the main Allendale campus there is the gorgeous Pew Campus in downtown Grand Rapids, and a second downtown campus on “medical hill”, as well as campuses in Holland, and Muskegon.

Here on the main GVSU campus a project is underway to build a new library facility. This week a fly through of the new facility was published on YouTube. It is going to be a remarkable facility indeed! I was very pleased to see that among with all of the new ultra modern library technologies (including an Apple-like “Genius Bar”), the new library will still have a “Collections Wing” with a “Browsable Books” area where its patrons can wander among shelves of very real physical books and browse for good reads. Being the gadget geek I am, you all might be surprised to learn I don’t yet own a Kindle or equivalent dedicated reader device. I don’t know exactly what it is, but for me there is nothing digital that replaces the authentic experience of reading with a real dog eared tome in hand. Don’t get me wrong, I love Google books, and a Kindle is probably a much more practical form factor if you need to lug the equivalent of a box of books with you on a trip somewhere. However, to truly experience a good read, I still prefer the old fashioned media.

I’ve embedded the youtube video above.  You can read more about the new Mary Idema Pew Library Learning and Information Commons here.

Twitter now let's you organize your favorite tweeters into lists. A very handy way to add some order to the tweet chaos.

The new “list” feature on Twitter is fantastic!  Basically, twitter follow lists lets you the user organize your twitter friends into meaningful lists to share with others.  This morning I started organizing various lists relating to mobile technology that I thought would be of interest to others.  So far, I’ve put together the following lists:

• Mobile Manufacturers:  Every manufacturer of consumer mobile devices I am aware of that has an official and active twitter presence.  This includes their main corporate twitter accounts as well as specialized twitter accounts (e.g. mobile products business units, developer communities, etc.)
• Mobile Operators: Every mobile operator/service provider I am aware of that has an active twitter account.  At the moment this list has a North American bias to it.  Eventually, I’ll get around to creating similar lists for other markets.
• Mobile Techies & Bloggers:  This is perhaps the most interesting list – everybody out there that I’ve encountered so far on twitter whom I think has something interesting to say about mobile.  I tried to be discerning here as there are a lot of people who are tweeting about mobile.  I didn’t not limit myself to folks in the USA, but I did try to limit it to those who tweet primarily in the English language. I’ll keep tweaking this as we go.  I’m sure I’ve overlooked a few obvious folks here… sorry in advance. 

This is still very much work in progress, but if you’re a mobile junkie, eavesdropping on these lists should help you very quickly tune into the tweets that matter.   I’ll be adding some addition mobile-related categories in the future.  If you find this useful, a  retweet would be greatly appreciated!

Just got that new iPhone?   Itching to flip bits on it?  How would you like to get paid to work with the latest/greatest mobile phone platforms?  The Mobile Applications and Services Lab in the GVSU School of Computing has a limited number of Graduate Assistantships open for Fall 2009 Semester.  If you are passionate about technology, creative, and have good communication skills please get in touch with us. You can check out the formal RA posting here.

Not currently enrolled at GVSU but interested in pursuing graduate studies in Computer Science here? Learn more here.

Hello GVSU School of Computing, College of Engineering, faculty, students, friends! After almost two decades of working in industry, I’ve recently joined the faculty at this wonderful institution. In some ways, I’m not very new around here. I actually graduated with my B.S. here way way back in 1987 before went off to graduate school at MSU (go Spartans!). Since 2002 I’ve occasionally served as an Adjunct Prof., teaching courses in the School of CIS graduate program. However, in other ways, I’m very new around here. GVSU is far from the tiny liberal arts college nestled in the pastures of Allendale, MI that I knew back in the mid-80s. Today it is Michigan’s fastest growing public university (~ 24k students) with a number of absolutely drop dead gorgeous new campuses spread around the various communities of West Michigan.  Along with all these new and grand facilities are of course a lot of new faces.  Most of the faculty who inspired me over two decades ago are now retired (thanks Bruce, Georgi, Ken and many others – you all were great teachers who had enormous impact on thousands of young budding computer scientists!) and replaced with yet more young, bright, and able faculty members from all over the globe.  I look forward to meeting and collaborating with my many new colleagues here in the School of CIS and across the university community.

Part of my new adventure here at GVSU involves heading up the new Mobile Applications and Services Laboratory. Our goal is to provide an environment in which students and faculty in the School of CIS can explore, innovate and conduct original research in the new and exciting area of mobile technology. We view this lab as a sort of sandbox in which experimental application research can be conducted by students and faculty but also a facility which can be leveraged by our computer science curriculum moving forward.

Hello also to the rest of the world out there! In addition to this page serving as my obligatory faculty “homepage” here at GVSU, it will also serve as my blog. Moving forward, on these pages you will find fresh details on what we are doing here in our lab at the university, and we also hope to share our perspective on what’s going on out there as well.

If you are part of the GVSU community, please stop by and say hello! My office is in C2-215 Mackinac Hall.  If you are part of the mobile technology community please check in as well.  You’ll find links on the right to the various communities I engage in.  Looking forward to hearing from you all!