Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN, B, BCPL, C, Multics, and Unix.
Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated from Harvard with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967, he began working at the Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research Center; he is currently the head of Lucent Technologies' System Software Research Department. In 1983, he and Ken Thompson jointly received the Turing award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system."
C and Unix
When asked what influenced him in developing C in the manner he did, Ritchie has been quoted to have said that it "looked like a good thing to do", and that anyone else in the same place at the same time would have done the same thing. Many, however, have said that this is part of Ritchie's modest personality. One of his Bell Labs colleagues, Bjarne Stroustrup, who developed and designed the C++ programming language, has been quoted to have said that "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn."
Indeed, being the inventor of the C programming language, as well as co-inventor of the Unix operating system alongside Ken Thompson, Ritchie has earned an important position in the history of the computer industry. C is still widely used today in application and operating system development and its influence can be seen in many more recent programming languages such as C++, C#, Objective-C, Java, and JavaScript. In the operating system world, Unix is also quite influential; there are many dialects of it available on the market today, such as AIX, Solaris, Mac OS X, BSD, and similar systems like Minix, as well as the popular Linux operating system. Indeed, even Microsoft, whose Windows operating systems compete with Unix, has developed Unix compatibility tools and C compilers for users and developers of their products.
Dennis has also contributed to the official successors of Unix and C: the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and the Limbo programming language, all of which build upon his previous work.
Nicknames
Dennis Ritchie is often referred to as "dmr" (his Bell Labs email address) in various Usenet newsgroups (such as comp.lang.c); he is the "R" of the The C Programming Language (book) commonly referred to as K&R.
Writings by Ritchie
Quotes
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party."
"Usenet is a strange place."
