Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York on the September 9 1941. Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967 he started working for the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center.
He is best known for creating the
C programming language with his colleague Brian Kernighan. They wrote the book titled ‘The C Programming Language’.
Dennis Ritchie is also known as the key developer of the
UNIX operating system on which he worked with Ken Thompson. It is said that one of Ritchie’s most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.
He received the
Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the
Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the
National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie died on October 12, 2011, at the age of 70. The Fedora 16 Linux distribution, which was released about a month after he died, was dedicated to his memory.
Visit Ritchie’s Home page at http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/.
‘The C Programming Language’ page at http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cbook/.