On Oct. 5, the entire world was shocked to hear about the death of Apple co- founder and former CEO Steve Jobs. A true visionary was lost that day, but in the wake of his death, the technology community suffered another loss just seven days later.

On Oct. 12, Dennis Ritchie was found dead in his Berkeley Heights, NJ home. Does his name ring a bell? I didn’t think so.

Dennis Ritchie was the Steve Jobs of the 1970s, during which he developed the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Don’t know what those are? Let me try to explain it to you.

The Apple operating system is Unix based and is programmed using C, C++ and Objective-C, along with most of the applications you buy from the App Store. To put it simply, without Dennis Ritchie there would be no Apple.

Not a fan of Apple? Well, the Android operating system is Linux based and is also programmed in C. Linux, which is Unix- based, was developed to be an open source platform that would rival Windows back in the early 1990s. Although it doesn’t stack up in the personal computing market, many large companies use Linux servers which are known for being able to handle larger loads of data traffic than Windows servers. I promise, that is the most technical I will get for the rest of this article.

It’s definitely weird to think that without two men that died within seven days of each other that life would be dramatically different. Although C, C++ and Objective-C are used heavily in the smart phone application market, it is also responsible for the majority of programs and websites including most of Adobe’s suite of applications, as well as Google and Amazon. This very newspaper, which relies exclusively on Apple computers and Adobe design software, would be nothing without the work that Steve Jobs and Dennis Ritchie did.

We can always say someone else may have come along and developed something else, but how can we be so sure? Everyone seems to know the Steve Jobs legacy, but it’s important that people know about Dennis Ritchie’s involvement as well.

Ultimately, it’s sad that Ritchie’s death went largely unnoticeable in the public eye while much of the technology community was saddened by his loss. Our newspaper preaches that the media be consistent, a sentiment that was repeated in last week’s editorial regarding the sex abuse scandals at Penn State and Syracuse.

This time the media not only let the public down, but they determined that Steve Jobs’ death was more important to cover than Ritchie’s. This man has done a great service to technology lovers everywhere as well as technology haters, because applications programmed in C make life easier even to non-tech-savvy people.

Although the media failed to notify the public that someone who is responsible for many things they use in their daily lives had passed away, there has been no shortage of support from people who realize just how great of an impact Dennis Ritchie made. Fedora, a leading distributor of a Linux- based operating system, dedicated their version 16 that was released two weeks ago to Dennis Ritchie’s memory. Many technology forums and websites have already written articles and had the same discussion that I am writing about now, but it’s safe to say that Dennis Ritchie will never be a household name, despite him being arguably more important than Steve Jobs.

Everyone, including media outlets, should be giving credit to where credit is due, not to give credit where it looks good on the evening news. So, just one time, please remember Dennis Ritchie the next time you visit Google or Amazon, or use your favorite Unix or Linux-based device.