Dennis Ritchie – Father Of C And UNIX Passes Away
Dennis Ritchie – Father Of C And UNIX Passes Away
After a long illness, Dennis Ritchie, father of C and Unix passed away last weekend at the age of 70.
Ritchie has created C programming language when others insisted that it is impossible and also developed UNIX along with Ken Thompson. Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967 and spent most of his career there. At the time of his joining, Bell Labs was one of the largest phone providers in the U.S. and had one of the most well-known research labs in operation.
In 1973, Ritchie and Thompson had rewritten Unix in C, developing its syntax, functionality and beyond to give the language the ability to program an operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received Turing Award in 1983 for their UNIX development. In 1998, he got National Medal of Technology from then-president Bill Clinton.
UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity – Dennis Ritchie
Reactions from around the Web :-
- So finally god needed the Unix master after getting Jobs there… something is really cooking up there in the heavens.
- This sucks. For all those non-techies: Without Ritchie, we would not have iOS for the iPhones, the Mac operating system and no basis for Java within the Android phones. Steve Jobs who passed away last week definitely stood on the shoulder of giants and this man was one of those giants. We lost two great tech leaders. Their impact was huge!
- God just called Steve. And now Dennis. I wonder what’s happening up there. “iGod” or G++?
- This man was a real innovator, and not too many people even knew his name. I’m sad that he died, but I’m more sad that he’s an unsung hero of our age.
