Dennis Ritchie- C & UNIX Legend Died
The inventor of the C programming language and key figure in the establishment of the founding principles of modern computer operating systems, Dennis Ritchie died Wednesday after a long illness at the age of 70.
News of Ritchie’s death was publicly reported by software engineer Rob Pike, a friend and former colleague of Ritchie’s, who posted the sad news to Google+.
“[Ritchie] was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind,” wrote Pike.
The son of Bell Labs scientist and switching circuit pioneer Alistair E. Ritchie, Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967, several years after graduating from Harvard with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. He also earned his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. It was at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center that Ritchie forged a career that included the creation of C, still perhaps the strongest pillar of application and operating system development today, and with Ken Thompson, the development of the UNIX operating system.
In 1973, Ritchie and Thompson recoded UNIX entirely in C, which greatly expanded the potential of UNIX. That version went on to have many iterations, and has since become one of the most important foundations of modern computing, and is the basis for popular operating systems, like Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X.
Ritchie went on to be appointed head of the System Software Research Department at Bell Labs' Computer Sciences Research Center, and received a Turing Award in 1983 and the US National Medal of Technology in 1998 along with Thompson for his work on C and Unix.
Ritchie is quoted as saying that, “UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand its simplicity.”
C is now the world's second most popular programming language, according to TIOBE. It paved the way for C++ and Java, while Unix paved the way for many, many operating systems, including BSD and Linux.
Throughout his career, Ritchie won a number of prestigious awards, including the Turning Award, which he and Thompson received in 1983 for their development of generic operating system theory; and the National Medal of Technology, which the pair received in 1999 from President Bill Clinton for their invention of UNIX and C.
