Tootfinder

For mysterious reasons, it's taken WaPo two months to report on the 1/1/24 death of Turing Award winner Niklaus Emil Wirth, who brought us Pascal and Modula-2 and evidently even the computer mouse. Gift link. #NEW
https://wapo.st/42YuMyl<…

I keep thinking about the historical context of the rise of Unix and Niklaus Wirth.
In my mind, Wirth's ideas represented a path-not-taken. Sure, he was influential, but his ideas didn't get the traction and wide-scale adoption of Unix.
The story goes, the US gov't didn't allow AT&T to sell software directly, so universities got Unix relatively cheaply for a "nominal fee."
That was an unintentional marketing coup. Every prof & student were…