After a long illness, Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and an esteemed computer scientist, died last weekend at the age of 70. Ritchie, also known as “dmr”, is best know for creating the C programming language as well as being instrumental in the development of UNIX along with Ken Thompson. Ritchie spent most of his career at Bell Labs, which at the time of his joining in 1967, was one of the largest phone providers in the U.S. and had one of the most well-known research labs in operation.
Working alongside Thompson (who had written B) at Bell in the late sixties, the two men set out to develop a more efficient operating system for the up-and-coming minicomputer, resulting in the release of Unix (running on a DEC PDP-7) in 1971.
Though Unix was cheap and compatible with just about any machine, allowing users to install a variety of software systems, the OS was written in machine (or assembly) language, meaning that it had a small vocabulary and suffered in relation to memory.
By 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. The kernel was published in the same year.
Today, C remains the second most popular programming language in the world (or at least the language in which the second most lines of code have been written), and ushered in C++ and Java; while the pair’s work on Unix led to, among other things, Linus Torvalds’ Linux. The work has without a doubt made Ritchie one of the most important, if not under-recognized, engineers of the modern era.
His work, specifically in relation to UNIX, led to him becoming a joint recipient of the Turing Award with Ken Thompson in 1983, as well as a recipient of the National Medal of Technology in 1998 from then-president Bill Clinton.
Source: techcrunch.com
Pioneering computer scientist Dennis Ritchie passed away yesterday at age 70 after battling a long running illness. Ritchie was better known as a co-creator of Unix, but he also invented the C programming language back in 1971.
Jeong Kim, President of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs confirmed his passing earlier today. "Dennis was well loved by his colleagues at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, and will be greatly missed. He was truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man. We would like to express our deepest sympathies to the Ritchie family, and to all who have been touched in some way by Dennis."
Ritchie grew up in New Jersey where his father worked as a switching systems engineer for Bell Labs. He went to Harvard University and graduated with a degree in Physics in 1963. It was during this time that Ritchie saw his first computer, which captured his imagination and sparked what became a lifelong passion. He then moved to MIT, before taking up employment with Bell Labs in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 2007.
At Bell Labs, Ritchie got involved in the Multics project before moving onto design the first versions of Unix with co-inventors. By the early seventies, Unix had spread across Bell Labs and was announced to the entire world.
The mid-seventies was a period of great experimentation in computer hardware design, making life for software programmers very hard with the cumbersome languages of the day. Ritchie responded by creating a new language named C -- the idea being that if the language followed set rules, and the computer could run C, than it could be moved between different hardware with little or no modification.
Along with co-inventors, he also re-wrote Unix from the ground up in his new programming language so it could benefit from the easier to use programming code. To this day, a vast amount of Unix software and programming languages depend on the foundations he and other programmers built with Unix and C in the earlier days of computing.
Tim Bray, a Google programmer said in a blog post that it was "impossible to overstate the debt his profession owes Dennis Ritchie." He further commented, "I've been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years."
His accomplishments and influence to computing as a whole were officially noticed in 1999 when he was awarded the US Medal of Technology and Innovation, the highest honor for technologists.
Source: techspot.com
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