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Two Asteroids Named After Unix Co-Creators
Ken Thompson (left) and Dennis Ritchie (center) receiving the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999.
Credit: Alcatel-Lucent
Two small asteroids now bear the names of two towering figures in computing history, Unix inventors Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie. Asteroid 300909 Kenthompson and 294727 Dennisritchie both were discovered in 2008 by Tom Glinos and D. H. Levy.
Rob Pike, who worked with the pair where the influential operating system was invented, AT&T's Bell Labs, flagged the news in a Google+ post Tuesdsay (March 6). Pike nowadays is heavily involved in Google's Go, a philosophical successor to the C programming language that Ritchie invented.
With an absolute magnitude of 15.5 and 15.6, respectively, Ritchie's and Thompson's asteroids are much less prominent than their namesakes, at least as viewed from Earth.
From CNET
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