The death of Steve Jobs, the visionary genius of Apple shocked the world, but he was not the only tech innovator we lost this year: ​​in 2011, other big names in technology have disappeared – and without the work of some of them, you may never have come to know who Steve Jobs was. Paul Baran, who helped create the technical basis for the Arpanet; Dennis Ritchie, the father of C and UNIX; in 2011 the world lost some of the great geniuses, pioneers, entrepreneurs and visionaries.

Dennis Ritchie

He is the father of the C programming language, which he used with his colleague Ken Thompson to build the UNIX operating system on which much of our world is built, including the Apple Empire. Ritchie is a name key to everything you see today.  The programming language he created is the basis for much of the functioning of computers, websites, games, animations, and derive from the C + +, PHP and Java, also key players in today’s technology.

Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs, the visionary founder and driving force behind Apple, succumbed to the effects of pancreatic cancer in October.  The importance of Jobs’ vision and business acumen for the IT sector in general and Apple in particular can hardly be underestimated.

Robert Morris

An important name for the creation of UNIX is the master of the mathematical and cryptographic Robert Morris, who died aged 78. He was the main contributor to the mathematical language of the system. As chief scientist of the National Security Agency’s National Computer Security, he led the team that protected military networks from external attacks.

Jacob E. Goldman

Died at the age of 90 Jacob E. Goldman, the man had who founded the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) of Xerox. Goldman worked at Ford and eventually approached by the Xerox. There he founded the research lab, paving the way for innovations such as the WYSIWYG editor, the laser printing and graphical user interface.

John McCarthy

If today we talk about artificial intelligence, it is in part thanks to mathematician, computer scientist and Professor John McCarthy, who died Oct. 24 at age 84. In 1956 he organized the Dartmouth Summer Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Later, he invented the LISP – one of the most influential programming languages ​​of the world – besides having a role in the development of time-sharing systems.

Paul Baran

On March 26, complications from lung cancer led to the death of Paul Baran, aged 84. He stressed the importance of aggregate data in ‘packets’. These ‘packets’ would then be sent by different ‘paths’ through a network and reassembled, piece by piece, when they reached their destination. Sound familiar for today’s networking world?  Yes, Baran was instrumental in the creation of a network for data exchange between scientists, the Arpanet, which underlie the Internet you know today.

Ilya Zhitomirskiy

In November, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, cofounder of a social networking site that became one of the known alternatives to the dominance of Facebook among netizens, died in San Francisco. Russian born, the young man was one of four students at the University of New York who created Diaspora in 2010, the social network classified as less centralized and more private than Facebook, Twitter and Google+.

Patricia Dunn

Early this month, we said good bye to Patricia Dunn, the former Hewlett-Packard Co. chairwoman, who died of ovarian cancer. She became the CEO of HP in 1998 and later was appointed to HP’s board. Dunn was instrumental in hiring former HP CEO Carly Fiorina.