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."
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#,
Perl and
Java. 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.
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.
The C Programming Language (
1978 with
Brian Kernighan see
K&R)
Unix Programmer's Manual (
1971)
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.""Usenet is a strange place."*
Dennis Ritchie's home page*
Transcript of an interview with Dennis Ritchie – Interview by
Michael S. Mahoney*
Interview with Dennis M. Ritchie - By Manuel Benet (published in LinuxFocus.org in July 1999)
*
Unix.se DMR interview published February 7. 2003*
Ritchie and Thompson Receive National Medal of Technology from President Clinton*
Video - TechNetCast At Bell Labs: Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan (1999-05-14)
*
The future according to Dennis Ritchie - LinuxWorld.com 12/4/00Dennis Ritche
