Dennis Ritchie - Designer of UNIX and C

Dennis Ritchie - Designer of UNIX and C.

On October 12 2011 computer scientist Dennis Ritchie who designed the UNIX operating system as well as the C programming language passed away. Thanks to his contributions, computing made a huge leap forward and enabled real-time processing and multi-threading. Dennis Ritchie was born on September 9 1941 in Bronxville, New York as son of Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist working on switching circuit theory Dennis Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics and in 1967 he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center following his father. In 1968 he received a PhD from Harvard with a thesis on the subject of subrecursive hierarchies of functions. About himself, we wrote: 'My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat. My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones.' . Ritchie came in contact with operation systems design at Bell Labs while contributing compilers for the BCPL and ALTRAN programming language to the Multics (project, then a joint effort of Bell Labs MIT and General Electric an influential early time-sharing operating system Subsequently, he aided Ken Thompson in creating the Unix operating system With his first porting of the Unix OS to the Interdata 8/32 computer Ritchie demonstrated its portability, and laid the groundwork for the widespread growth of Unix the Seventh Edition version from the Bell Labs research group was the basis for commercial Unix System V and also for the Unix BSD distributions from the University of California at Berkeley. Early in the development of Unix Ritchie added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language thus producing the new programming language C C was the foundation for the portability of Unix but it has become widely used in other contexts as well, much application and system development for computers of all sizes, from hand-held to supercomputer, uses it. In 1983 Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of Unix. In 1990 both Ritchie and Thompson also received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (and in 1997 both were made Fellows of the Computer History Museum. On April 21 1999 Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the National Medal of Technology of 1998 from President Bill Clinton. On October 12 2011 Ritchie was found dead in his apartment in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. His contribution to computer science must be highly valued, because with Unix and C he formed the shape of the modern information society enabling such things as search engines or even smart phones . Learn more about the history of the world's most famous operating system UNIX in the ATT Tech channel documentation produced by Bell Labs in 1982, a decade after its first implementation.

Back to index