Dennis Ritchie creator of C and Unix passes away
Ritchie went to work at Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research Center in 1967 and was widely known as "dmr". As part of an AT&T restructuring in the mid-1990s, Ritchie was transferred to Lucent Technologies, where he retired in 2007 as head of System Software Research Department.
Lest we forget, that none of what we do or have available today would have been remotely possible without the likes of Dennis Ritchie, Steve Jobs and many others.
Ritchie was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the 'C' programming language and for co-development of the UNIX operating system.
President Bill Clinton awarded Ritchie and Thompson the National Medal of Technology in 1999 for their contributions to Unix and C. He won many other national and international awards for his work and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the C programming language and for co-development of the Unix operating system."
Ritchie had the lifestyle and habits to match his position as an early guru of IT. Long-haired and bearded, and famously more owl than lark, he started work at midday in his industry-standard chaotic office, emerging late in the evening to go home and carry on working through to the small hours at the end of a leased line connected to the Bell Labs computers.
Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. He 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. He then moved to MIT, before taking up employment with Bell Labs in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 2007.
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.
The two men set out to develop a more efficient operating system for the up-and-coming minicomputer, resulting in the release of Unix.
Almost every programmer writes his first code in C and in the course of doing so comes across the “Kernighan and Ritchie” book on C. The book is nearly 30 years old (first published in 1978), but the lessons are as fresh today, as they were three decades ago. The book has been reprinted ever since, maintaining the same flavor. The thickness of the book will surprise you. However, people have claimed to find more useful things in the book than other bestsellers. Nevertheless, this is not what makes C legendary.
Before the birth of the C language, there was diversity in hardware. Every hardware device had its own fancy instruction set and you had to write assembly code following them. There was absolutely no portability of programs which means that programs written in one computing device would not on another.
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.
A vast number of modern technologies depend on the work he and fellow programmers did on Unix and C in the early days of the computer revolution.
Unix's influence has been felt in many ways. It established many software engineering principles that persist until today; it was the OS of choice for the internet.
The collaboration with Thompson on the design of UNIX as a portable, multi-tasking, multi-user—and ultimately wildly influential—operating system that earned Ritchie perhaps his most lasting fame in the world of computing.
UNIX, originally a "programmer's workbench" that was re-coded in C in the early 1970s, became a widely used operating system in devices and computers ranging from cell phones to enterprise servers as the architecture's flexibility, openness, and the ease of adding new software tools to the base UNIX kernel attracted users in academia and industry. The UNIX client-server model was also instrumental in the evolution of computing from stand-alone machines to massively networked computing environments, and Ritchie's work was essential to the development of the biggest computer network of them all, the Internet.
Today, many widely used operating systems and programming languages—including Google's Android, Apple's Mac OS and iOS, Linux, C++, and JavaScript—owe their existence to Ritchie's pioneering work on C and UNIX.
Sources:
TechCrunch
BBC
reddit
mashable
Wikipedia
techie-buzz
TechSpot
TechCrunch
news.cnet
LinkedIn
Ritchie went to work at Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research Center in 1967 and was widely known as "dmr". As part of an AT&T restructuring in the mid-1990s, Ritchie was transferred to Lucent Technologies, where he retired in 2007 as head of System Software Research Department.
Lest we forget, that none of what we do or have available today would have been remotely possible without the likes of Dennis Ritchie, Steve Jobs and many others.
Ritchie was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the 'C' programming language and for co-development of the UNIX operating system.
President Bill Clinton awarded Ritchie and Thompson the National Medal of Technology in 1999 for their contributions to Unix and C. He won many other national and international awards for his work and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the C programming language and for co-development of the Unix operating system."
Ritchie had the lifestyle and habits to match his position as an early guru of IT. Long-haired and bearded, and famously more owl than lark, he started work at midday in his industry-standard chaotic office, emerging late in the evening to go home and carry on working through to the small hours at the end of a leased line connected to the Bell Labs computers.
Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. He 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. He then moved to MIT, before taking up employment with Bell Labs in 1967, where he remained until his retirement in 2007.
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.
The two men set out to develop a more efficient operating system for the up-and-coming minicomputer, resulting in the release of Unix.
Almost every programmer writes his first code in C and in the course of doing so comes across the “Kernighan and Ritchie” book on C. The book is nearly 30 years old (first published in 1978), but the lessons are as fresh today, as they were three decades ago. The book has been reprinted ever since, maintaining the same flavor. The thickness of the book will surprise you. However, people have claimed to find more useful things in the book than other bestsellers. Nevertheless, this is not what makes C legendary.
Before the birth of the C language, there was diversity in hardware. Every hardware device had its own fancy instruction set and you had to write assembly code following them. There was absolutely no portability of programs which means that programs written in one computing device would not on another.
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.
A vast number of modern technologies depend on the work he and fellow programmers did on Unix and C in the early days of the computer revolution.
Unix's influence has been felt in many ways. It established many software engineering principles that persist until today; it was the OS of choice for the internet.
The collaboration with Thompson on the design of UNIX as a portable, multi-tasking, multi-user—and ultimately wildly influential—operating system that earned Ritchie perhaps his most lasting fame in the world of computing.
UNIX, originally a "programmer's workbench" that was re-coded in C in the early 1970s, became a widely used operating system in devices and computers ranging from cell phones to enterprise servers as the architecture's flexibility, openness, and the ease of adding new software tools to the base UNIX kernel attracted users in academia and industry. The UNIX client-server model was also instrumental in the evolution of computing from stand-alone machines to massively networked computing environments, and Ritchie's work was essential to the development of the biggest computer network of them all, the Internet.
Today, many widely used operating systems and programming languages—including Google's Android, Apple's Mac OS and iOS, Linux, C++, and JavaScript—owe their existence to Ritchie's pioneering work on C and UNIX.
Sources:
TechCrunch
BBC
mashable
Wikipedia
techie-buzz
TechSpot
TechCrunch
news.cnet
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