(credit: Photograph by Kevin Marks)
This week, as I was sitting in my father’s hospital room, I glanced at my phone and saw something strange going on with my Twitter notifications. A story I wrote five years ago was suddenly exploding across social media. It was my tribute to Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and co-creator of Unix, republished from Ars by Wired on October 12, 2011:
“By creating C, Ritchie gave birth to the concept of open systems.” https://t.co/C1v9oE7sNG nice eulogy for dmr by @thepacketrat
— ROBERT HACKETT (@rhhackett) October 13, 2016
Poignant and brilliant obituary from @thepacketrat https://t.co/As17phNuEL
— mikey (@MikeyJck) October 12, 2016
I wasn’t sure what had set this off. But the deluge began to build even more after this tweet from Om Malik:
Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Co-Developer of Unix, Dies https://t.co/LxkCK6i1DE via @WIRED
— Om Malik (@om) October 13, 2016
Malik later apologized for posting a five-year-old story—one that was perhaps overshadowed at the time by the attention paid to the passing of Steve Jobs a week earlier. But he clearly wasn’t the only one who thought the story was fresh news, as my Twitter and Facebook timelines showed.
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Source: Ars Technica – TFW an obituary you wrote five years ago goes viral