PERSON
Dennis Ritchie
Designer of the C programming language (1972) and, with Ken Thompson, co-creator of UNIX. Spent his career at Bell Labs. ACM Turing Award 1983; US National Medal of Technology 1999. He died quietly on 12 October 2011, a week after Steve Jobs; the news was largely overshadowed.
Profile
- Born
- 1941
- Died
- 2011
- Span
- 70 years
- Appearances
- 02
- Name
- ENDennis RitchieJAデニス・リッチー
Appearances
- 1969The Birth of UNIX — Bell LabsHaving left the Multics project, Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Labs began writing a small timesharing system on an idle PDP-7. Initially an experiment for one user, it gained a second when Dennis Ritchie joined; in 1970 it was named UNICS (later UNIX). Its rewrite in the C language (1972) gave it portability, and the operating-system lineage that followed has dominated the next half-century. Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS all descend from it.
- 1972The C Language — Dennis RitchieDennis Ritchie at Bell Labs extended Ken Thompson's B language with a type system, producing C. UNIX was rewritten in it in 1973, making it the first language in which an operating system could be moved to different hardware as source code. Together with the 1978 K&R book *The C Programming Language*, C became the de facto standard of systems programming for more than half a century. C++, Objective-C, C#, Go, Rust, Zig, and most current systems languages either descend from C or are deliberately designed against its model.