It’s funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agenda. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody — except for a few geeks — notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact if you’re reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969.

The software is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time. It emerged from Bell Labs — the R&D facility of AT&T, the lightly regulated monopoly that ran the US telephone network for generations.

Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were two bright Bell programmers who had been assigned to work with MIT on the design of a complex multi-user operating systemn - Multics. In the end, the plug was pulled on the project, with the result that Bell Labs found itself with two pissed-off hackers on its books. Back in the lab, Ritchie and Thompson decided that they would just have to build the operating system themselves. So, in a fantastic burst of creativity they wrote Unics. Inevitably the ‘cs’ became ‘x’ and Unix was born.

Thus did AT&T find itself the astonished proprietor of a uniquely powerful and innovative operating system. The problem was that it couldn’t sell it, because under the Consent Decree that gave it the telephone monopoly AT&T was not allowed to be in the computer business. So the researchers in Bell Labs did what geeks do - they gave it away to their peers in university research labs.

In doing this Ritchie and Thompson unwittingly launched the academic discipline of computer science, because universities were able to give their students free yet powerful software. Geeks were free to modify and improve on this — which is what Bill Joy and his fellow students at Berkeley did when they created their own version of Unix, called BSD for Berkeley Software Distribution.

The neatest twist of all, however, involves Apple. OS X — the operating system that now powers every Apple product — is actually built on the Berkeley distribution of Unix, so if you hack into your iPhone what you’ll find is BSD 4.2. You could say, therefore, that what Apple really did was to give Unix a pretty face.