If you take an iPhone, it has so many thing invented by people, this article does not make any sense to me.
Someone invented wireless communication, someone plastics, someone metal, someone thin glass, someone a touch screen, someone RAM, someone a CPU, someone transistors on a lower level, someone invented software, someone icons, someone wrote an email client for the first time, some invented the machinery to build this, someone "invented" power, someone invented WLAN, some invented the battery, someone invented circuit boards, ...
Sure. But if you try to find commonalities amongst all those sub-components and dependencies you find that a great many of them carry back to dmr. Whereas the only comparable commonalities for things such as plastics and whatnot would tend to be scientists working hundreds of years ago.
More so, dmr's work probably has had a more direct impact on the design and construction of the iphone than the inventor of wifi or a particular plastic or what-have-you. Likely any of those inventions would have merely been invented by others. The same cannot necessarily be said for unix and C. We would have something else, certainly, perhaps we would even have something better, but the fact that dmr's imprint still remains on operating systems and languages is rather remarkable.
I'm sure, if C was not dominant, the iPhone could have been written say in Pascal. There is nothing specific in C that makes it a requirement for the iPhone. The same goes for operating systems.
Regarding the imprint: No user will see an imprint of C in his iPhone, and the applications could be written in Pascal to the same iPhone APIs.
Someone invented wireless communication, someone plastics, someone metal, someone thin glass, someone a touch screen, someone RAM, someone a CPU, someone transistors on a lower level, someone invented software, someone icons, someone wrote an email client for the first time, some invented the machinery to build this, someone "invented" power, someone invented WLAN, some invented the battery, someone invented circuit boards, ...