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Dennis Ritchie

Brief Description: Creator of C and coinventor (with Ken Thompson) of Unix

Further Details:

Here's how Ritchie describes the creation of C:

"Early in the development of Unix, I added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language, thus producing the new language C. C was the foundation for the portability of Unix, but it has become widely used in other contexts as well; much application and system development for computers of all sizes, from hand-held to supercomputer, uses it. There are unified U.S. and international standards for the language, and it is the basis for Stroustrup's work on its descendant C++."

Nowhere is the career of Dennis Ritchie better summarized than at the Bell Labs Web site, where it is distilled in the following few lines:

1941 -- Born in Bronxville, N.Y.
1963 -- Graduates from Harvard University with a B.S. in Physics
1968 -- Receives from Harvard University a Ph.D. in mathematics
1967 -- Joins Bell Labs, following his father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there
1968 -- Joins the Bell Labs team working on Multics, a joint effort of Bell Labs, MIT and GE to develop a general computer operating system
1972 -- Creates C language
1989 -- Receives with Ken Thompson the NEC C&C Prize for significant contributions to computer technology
1983 -- Named Bell Labs Fellow
1988 -- Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering
1990 -- Appointed head, System Software Research Department in the Computer Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, N.J.
1995 -- Heads the effort to create the Plan 9 operating system
1996 -- Heads the effort to create the Inferno(TM) operating system
1998 -- Awarded with Kenneth Thompson the U.S. National Medal of Technology for the development of the UNIX system

Other SYS-CON stories about Dennis Ritchie

You've Come a Long Way, Unix

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