To be fair, Jobs had considerably more consumer-level celebrity than Ritchie.
You don't have to be a geek to worship your iDevice and its provenance, but having cult reverence for the creator of C and UNIX puts you in a much rarer (and more neckbearded) group. At that time I referenced Ritchie several times to groups (of relatively technical people) I had, and while everyone knew of Jobs, only maybe 20% even recognized Ritchie's name.
You don't have to be a geek to worship your iDevice and its provenance, but having cult reverence for the creator of C and UNIX puts you in a much rarer (and more neckbearded) group. At that time I referenced Ritchie several times to groups (of relatively technical people) I had, and while everyone knew of Jobs, only maybe 20% even recognized Ritchie's name.