I'm pretty sure that's not in the New Testament, but would be interested if you find a reference.

"L" was the game that first got me hooked with computers. I played that game through to completion on one of our school's BBC micros, even though it involved doing so during break times, lunch and after school. I was very fortunate to have a maths teacher that was really into the BBC and knew what could be done with computers. We had an Econet network, fileserver and a computer room that we could spend our breaks in.

The OS and built in BASIC in the BBC are extremely elegant: functions, procedures, a VDU driver that treated the screen as 1280x1024 logical units, so graphics plotting worked, regardless of the physical screen resolution, multiple filesystems, support for additional languages, the ability to peek and poke from with BASIC as well as the amazing built-in assembler. The hardware could be upgraded beyond anything the other 8bit micros of the day could due to a huge number of I/O ports. I remember being very confused when I got my first PC and QBASIC was the only bundled language. It all felt so primitive compared with the elegance of Acorn's 8bit range.

I've still got a mint condition BBC Master with an internal second processor (offload the program to the co-pro and use the base machine for I/O duties only). Very tempted to add a Retroclinic Datacentre so I can plug in USB sticks and run software from there.

The BBC micro, in the hands of a good teacher, was a machine that shaped lives. I'm in IT because my maths teacher "got it" and passed on his enthusiasm.

The BBC news report on Dennis Ritchie's death: here.

Would be good to see this hit the Most Read section of the site.

It's no exaggeration that without Dennis Ritchie's contributions, many of us would have very different careers. I've been fortunate to spend the first 12 years of my IT career working on multiple Unix and Linux systems, and although I'm not much of a coder, I've compiled a fair amount of C and recognise that if it hadn't been invented, neither would C++ or C#, which constitutes a lot of the code in use today.

Without Unix, what would the Internet been built on? Perhaps something like VMS? Would tools like Sendmail or BIND been developed in those environments? The influence of Unix can be seen everywhere in IT.

Actually, without Unix, we wouldn't have had NeXTstep, which became MacOS X, which became iOS. We wouldn't have had Minix or Linux, so no Android. So the mobile landscape would have been different as well.

I don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say that Dennis Ritchie's legacy is the IT industry we have today. Most of us stand on this giant's shoulders.

RIP Dennis Ritchie.

I don't know where you're posting from, but in the UK, the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Yemen and Libya were/are running as lead items on the main TV news. It's major news and being treated in the same way the Orange and Velvet revolutions were.

I was going to point out the danger of quoting a couple of verses from the Bible without establishing context, but even taken on its own, Mark 10:29-30 isn't advocating the sort of disconnect being discussed.

Try reading it in its context: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:17-31&version=MSG

(using a modern paraphrase, The Message, because it gets the point across in everyday language. If that bothers you and you want a more literal translation, try this: http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Mark%2010:17-31&version=NIV)

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This article (and subsequent posts) have demonstrated that the once trusted car analogy is no longer in favour and from now on, complicated subjects should be explained using balloons instead.

Thank you for your co-operation in welcoming our new balloon overloads. Or something.