A closer look

Modern computing infrastructure rests on the shoulders of a guy who just wanted to game in peace. In the early 1970s, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were trying to play a text-based game called "Space Travel" on an old PDP-7 computer. Finding the existing operating systems and languages too slow and cumbersome, Ritchie casually invented the C programming language to rewrite the system. That little side quest birthed the foundation of Windows, MacOS, and Linux.