Another World Changer Passes

So in the last week Dennis Ritchie passed.

Nowhere near as well known as Steve Jobs, but at least as important.

Dennis Ritchie was a co-creator of UNIX and the C Programming Language. Without him we would be dealing with a very different computing landscape. Linux, Mac OS X and a whole lot of other technologies wouldn’t exist without the work that he did so many years ago.

Unlike Steve Jobs there won’t be the huge outpourings of grief at Apple Stores all over the world, but, there should be, because without the work of Dennis Ritchie its arguable that Apple wouldn’t be the company that it is, neither would a lot of others.

So farewell to another pioneer who changed the world.

Here we go down the Yellow Brick Road because there's a Pot of Gold at the end of the Rainbow

This is the first in a series of many posts on the changes that are happening at the site of one of my clients based in Brisbane.

They have been successfully running a mixed environment of UNIX (AIX and BSD), Linux (Red Hat), MacOS X, Windows XP and 7 for a few years. Kept their costs down while keeping the availability up.

The company has 10 sites on the eastern seaboard of Australia and about a hundred and fifty users.

Recently their Group Financial Controller convinced the company management to ignore the advice of their in house IT guys and move to a Windows mono-culture. The reason she did this was because in her extensive experience with IT this was the only environment that worked and would deliver huge benefits to the business, short and long term.

They asked me to get involved and help 'guide' the in-house IT guys with the change.

Now personally I don't think this is going to be a smart idea, or a cheap one or that it will deliver any of the huge benefits to the business that she's claiming. That being said I think its going to be an interesting journey for us to follow.

So lets saddle up and see where the yellow brick road is going to take us.