“An early strength of the Unix system was the way it allowed different programs to cooperate on a task, and Cherry, who described herself as “thinking in Unix,” often found ways to apply an insight or feature from one application to a seemingly unrelated context.”
Lorinda Cherry wrote dc, bc and eqn at Bell Labs, tools still on nearly every Unix box half a century later. Her Writer’s Workbench spread into high school and college English departments. Most people who type bc have never heard her name. The industry remembers the men who founded Unix and forgets the people who filled it.