On top of it all, Steve Jobs wasn't even in tech. He was in sales.
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Is this a real example? Or are we just talking about linux here
Nebraska and 2003 have got to be fictional details, but there's several small programs or libraries that have some kind of similar story.
You weren't there for the Leftpad fiasco, I take it?
A huge proportion (most?) of server infrastructure runs on linux.
That's what I meant. I phrased it badly, i meant to ask if it was about Linux or something else
It was leftpad. A stupid little function that was used by like 90% of the internet, and it crashed everything during a name dispute.
My go to real example is curl
Christopher's Universal Request Library
In case anyone thinks you're serious, that's not what it stands for.
Yeah, its just Chris, dude HATES when people call him Christopher.
Crazy Ubiquitous, Raw, and Ludicrous
They are real people
XZ Utils (maintained single-handedly by Lasse Collin) is widely regarded as the most critical infrastructure library run by one person. Its near-catastrophic compromise in 2024 revealed how global digital security hinges on solo, thanklessly managed open-source projects. Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
Other major examples include cURL (Daniel Stenberg) and SQLite (D. Richard Hipp)
While those are the main developers neither is alone in maintaining their respective software.
When I last talked to Richard he had company to work on SQLite. It was like four people.
SQLite is still deployed on everything, everywhere. You browser. Your phone. Macs. Half of Linux machine. Your airplane. It's super impressive.
Also interesting is that it's one of the small number of unquestionably public domain pieces of software. Not open source, but public domain. It's not entirely clear if you can technically put your own work in the public domain, or if you're just freely licensing it to anyone.
Sqlite was initially developed for the US military though, which explicitly makes it public domain.
It doesn't matter, but it's interesting.
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Ronald is indescribably more important than any tech billionaire could ever hope to be. So let's raise a glass and give out a hardy thank you to all the Ronalds of the world!
Too bad all the tech billionaires profit from Ronald's work while he does it for free.
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Marketing>the reason for it
This is why when Steve Jobs died in 2011 another far more important figure died... Dennis Ritchie. The man who made the C programming language and Unix, without which nothing Apple produced would be possible.
Not to downplay dmr's importance here because he quite literally is the father of modern computing, but without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later. A different systems programming language and a different operating system everything else is modeled after. High-level programming languages weren't a new concept when he wrote C. Before B they already had Fortran. Funny to call any of those High-level in 2026, but that's the whole importance of C, isn't it? It made writing complex systems easy compared to assembly languages or even fortran.
I'm not gonna bother doing a writeup about Jobs, we all here know he made precisely Jack shit.
Not necessarily against what you said, but I realized you can kinda say that about anything, with some abstraction. There’s always smart people (thankfully), and they’ll often arrive at the same solutions. Roll over, Gauss.
Well I think it's different for scientific discoveries where something is either found or not. Software and other products... There are niche things that may never exist without the author, and there are generic things that would be created in one form or another anyway. Once programming languages were a thing, general purpose high level languages were bound to happen IMO and there are infinite possible languages.
Sure, but what I’m saying is that at a high level of abstraction scientific discoveries are similarly inevitable as well. I don’t think niche creations are a major difference since as you yourself stated “without him we'd just have something else and perhaps it would've been a bit later.”. The majority build on previous findings, often many scientists are working towards the same goals, and truth is truth, whether it be found through physical experimentation or fleshing out applied logic.
Apple used Pascal up until the System 7 era anyway, C was just one of many choices of the time.
If we didn't have C, we'd probably have eliminated things like buffer overflows and out of bounds memory accesses decades ago.
Oh wow I didn't realize Pascal was even older than C, thought it showed up in like mid-70s or early 80s. To be fair I've ever only interacted with Delphi, not OG Pascal.
While I don't necessarily like C, I am happy for C-style syntax over Pascal-style, which I've also worked with. Give me braces over begin and end any day of the week.
Yeah, Apple would just steal literally every single idea and piece of software from someone else
handles all math on every machine on earth
That's just gmp. The go-to unlimited precision arithmetic library.
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Not sure if it's part of the joke but that word means "jerk" (as in "jerk off") in Swedish.
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