1941–2011 · Co-creator of Unix; creator of C; Turing Award laureate (1983)
Also known as: Ritchie, dmr
Dennis Ritchie co-created Unix with Ken Thompson at Bell Labs and created the C programming language. In 1973 he rewrote Unix in C, making it portable across hardware architectures — a decision that ultimately allowed Linux, also written in C, to run on everything from microcontrollers to supercomputers.
He co-authored The C Programming Language (K&R) with Brian Kernighan in 1978, the canonical reference for the language the Linux kernel is still written in. He received the Turing Award with Thompson in 1983.
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
