Modern computing as we know and use it today would not exist without Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C programming language and co-founder of the UNIX operating system.
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, known in online newsgroups and as "dmr" (his email address at Bell Labs), was born in Bronxville, New York on September 9, 1941, and graduated from Harvard with a degree in physics and applied mathematics.
In 1967, at the age of 26, he began working at the Bell Labs Computer Science Research Center.
Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language and as a key contributor to the development of the UNIX operating system.
He is also the author of the most definitive book on C, 'The C Programming Language',
Ritchie's creation of C and his role in the development of UNIX along with Ken Thompson have established him as an important pioneer of modern computing.
C is still used today in operating system development, which is due to the fact that many educational institutions use the Linux operating system, which is based on UNIX.
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However, the development of the C compiler was in turn based on ideas and principles from other languages, such as Pascal.
The popular Linux and its tools are descendants of Ritchie's work, while Microsoft includes UNIX compatibility tools in Windows and provides versions of the C compiler.
After the success of Unix, Ritchie continued research into operating systems and programming languages, with contributions to the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and the Limbo programming language.
In 1983, Ritchie and Ken Thompson jointly received the Turing Award "for their development of general operating systems theory and in particular for their implementation of the UNIX operating system."
To better understand the magnitude of its importance, name any computer vendor, and every one of them had some implementation of UNIX. Even Microsoft, which once owned a product called XENIX.
Click on the image below to see in detail and understand the relationships of this “family”:
On April 27, 1999, Thompson and Ritchie received the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton "for their joint development of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language, which led to significant advances in computer hardware and software, networked systems, and spurred the growth of an entire industry, strengthening American leadership in the Information Age.".
Dennis Ritchie was found dead in the home where he lived alone in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, on October 12, 2011. He was 70 years old and had previously suffered from serious health problems.
[su_button url=”https://www.secnews.gr/102764/the-history-linux/” target=”blank” style=”flat” background=”#e9f126″ color=”#0404047″ wide=”yes” center=”yes” radius=”20″ icon_color=”#ffffff”]Read more: The History of Linux: How Linux Became Everyone's Favorite Child[/su_button]
We owe Dennis Ritchie more than we can ever imagine. Without his contributions, it is likely that none of us would be able to use personal computers today, sophisticated software applications, or even the modern Internet.
No Android smartphones, no DVRs and streaming devices, no Steve Jobs' Macs & iPads.
Neither does Microsoft Windows 10 or Surface Books.
Neither Cloud, nor AWS, nor Azure.
