1941–2011 — Co-creator of Unix; creator of C; Turing Award laureate (1983)
Also known as: Ritchie, dmr
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967 and, with Ken Thompson, designed and built Unix in the early 1970s. Where Thompson wrote the first kernel in assembly, Ritchie created the C programming language (evolving it from Thompson's B) and rewrote Unix in it in 1973 — the moment an operating system first became portable across different computer architectures.
C and Unix were inseparable: the language was shaped by what an OS needed to be written in, and the OS was shaped by what the language made easy. The book Ritchie wrote with Brian Kernighan, The C Programming Language (1978, known universally as K&R), is one of the best-selling technical books ever published and taught a generation of programmers.
Ritchie received the Turing Award with Thompson in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. He died in October 2011, a week after Steve Jobs — an event largely overshadowed in the press, despite the fact that almost every piece of software running on a Mac, iPhone, Android phone, web server, or Linux system was directly descended from his work.
Related people: Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy
Works cited in this book:
- The UNIX Time-Sharing System (1974) (with Ken Thompson)
- The C Programming Language (1978) (with Brian W. Kernighan)
- On the Security of UNIX (1979)
- The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System (1984)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 2: A History of Unix and Linux — 1969: The Birth of Unix
