Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York, in 1941. The son of a Bell Labs engineer, he studied physics and then applied mathematics at Harvard, where in 1968 he defended a doctoral thesis in logic on the hierarchies of recursive functions. That same year he joined the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, where he would work for forty years. There he met Ken Thompson, with whom he formed the founding duo of modern systems computing. In 1969, after Bell Labs withdrew from the Multics project, Thompson wrote the first version of a minimal operating system on a PDP-7 ; it would be named UNIX. Ritchie joined him immediately ; together they ported the system to the PDP-11 between 1970 and 1971. To make the code portable, Ritchie designed the C language from 1969 to 1973, derived from Thompson's B, and published its description with Brian Kernighan in 1978 as "The C Programming Language", known as "K&R". In 1973 UNIX was rewritten in C — unprecedented for an operating system — allowing it to migrate easily to dozens of architectures through the 1980s. Ritchie and Thompson jointly received the Turing Award in 1983, the National Medal of Technology in 1999, and the Japan Prize in 2011. Ritchie's influence is foundational : C remains one of the most widely used languages, the base of the Linux, Windows NT and macOS kernels and of almost every embedded system ; UNIX spawned the BSD family, Linux (carried on by Linus Torvalds from 1991) and macOS (which Steve Jobs would adopt as the core of OS X in 2001). Ritchie died at his home in Berkeley Heights in October 2011, a week after Steve Jobs, with a quiet understatement that contrasts with the deep imprint he left on the electronic era and personal computing traced on this site.