Not only does the articled underestimate Jobs' influence, it also in my opinion (and I realize this may brand me as a heretic) overstates Ritchies' influence.

Not only does the articled underestimate Jobs' influence, it also in my opinion (and I realize this may brand me as a heretic) overstates Ritchies' influence. It's not as if there were no time sharing operating systems prior to UNIX, or no OS development concurrent with UNIX, and the same can certainly be said about C (in fact, many people would argue that C had a deleterious effect on computing overall). A computing world based on e.g. Lisp and ITS, or Smalltalk, or Algol 68 and MULTICS would certainly look different than what we have now, but it's not a given to me that it would be inferior to what we have now.