Great personalities of the computing deceased recently

John McCarthy (September 4, 1927 - October 24, 2011):

Between other prizes was granted with the Turing prize due to his advances in Artificial Intelligence. Coined the name of this discipline "Artificial Intelligence" in the conference of Darthmouth of 1956, although time after said that if he had to rename it he would call it "Computational Intelligence".

Devised, in 1958, the first declarative programming language LISP, thought to create intelligent systems. Was the second high programming language after FORTRAN. From this language several ideas was taken to be used in the rest of the languages that emerges after it, as for instance C. Concepts that now seems basics, as the use of functions, was introduced by this language.

McCarthy contributed, in a lot of other things, in the computational sciences. If someone is interested here you have a compilation of all of his scientific papers.

Dennis Richie (September 9, 1941 - October 12, 2011)

Other Turing prize, given by his advances in operating systems. With Kenneth Lane Thompson developed the Unix operating system, that was used by Andrew S. Tanenbaum to do Minix and this last was used later by Linus Torvalds to learn the necessary to develop Linux.

Also invented one of the programming languages more used in the world: C. This language has been a big influence for other languages more modern as C++, C#, Java, PHP, Javascript, etc. Wrote a book about this language with Brian W. Kernighan called "C programming language". This book only can be understood by someone that already knows C, and is the book that a lot of universities use to do exams with trap questions, due to this is one of the most known books on the careers of computer engineering. From the names of the authors of this book emerge the programming term, use the braces with the style "Kernighan-Ritchie", is to say in this way:

	if (1){
		printf("Hello world!");
	}

Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 - October 5, 2011)

The only of the list that hasn't a Turing prize but equally has contributed to change the world by trading and leading the development of good ideas. Worldwide famous and acclaimed by raise Apple from the ruin with gadgets that begins with "i" and have a cool design (iPod, iPhone e iPad). Also well-known by found Pixar and be a director of Disney.

His achievements of the past are more important, found Apple and lead the creation of the Apple Lisa. This was the first computer with graphical interface and mouse. Although Steve Jobs copied the idea of the mouse from Xerox invented by Doublas Engelbart, the commercialization of this idea, contributed enormously to that actually a lot of people have a computer in their houses. Despite of be the precursor of this and other ideas, was Microsoft which has been arrived to has more commercial success, after the development of Windows.

When had to left Apple, found NeXT Computer and developed new computers. These disappeared but, in their legacy, left the object oriented programming language Objective-C, which used its operating system. Today, this language is used by all the products of Apple. From this epoch also emerged the framework WebObjects, for the development of Web applications based on Java and that was used to implement the Apple Store and iTunes.

Also is an achievement to take into account, the production of "Toy Story", the first film totally animated by computer, which gave an important turn to the animation industry.