Dennis Ritchie

Co-creator of Unix and C programming language

He co-created the Unix operating system and the C programming language with Ken Thompson.^[1][2]

Quick Facts

Birth name

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie

Born

9 September 1941

Birthplace

Bronxville, New York, U.S.

Died

12 October 2011

Place of death

Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, U.S.

Education

Harvard University (BS)

Doctoral advisor

Patrick C. Fischer

Known for

ALTRAN
B
BCPL
C
Multics
Unix

Facts from the source article.

Life and work

In 1967 he began working at the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center.^[3] Ritchie never officially received his PhD degree because he refused to pay for a bound copy for the Harvard library.^[2] Ritchie retired in 2007 as head of System Software Research Department at Lucent Technologies.^[4] Alistair E. Ritchie, Dennis's father, spent many years as a Bell Labs scientist and also contributed to a book about switching circuit theory titled The Design of Switching Circuits.^[5]

Under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer at Harvard, Ritchie produced a draft of his doctoral dissertation, "Computational Complexity and Program Structure," in 1968.^[3] Thompson located an older PDP-7 machine and, with assistance from Ritchie and others, built a new operating system and applications from the ground up.^[6] The C programming language was created by Ritchie, and it took the place of the earlier B language that Thompson had developed.^[6][7] Ritchie and Brian Kernighan were the authors of the volume The C Programming Language.^[7]

What the cited sources add

The same source reports that Ritchie's sister Lynn found no official copy at Harvard after his death.^[2] Ritchie's loop program solution to that problem became the core of his 1968 dissertation.^[2] A 1999 interview with Ritchie on LinuxFocus.org quotes him saying he viewed Unix and Linux as "the continuation of ideas that were started by Ken and me and many others."^[8][9] The BBC reported that Ritchie died after a long illness, with first news coming from former colleague Rob Pike.^[10]

References

Wikipedia, "Dennis Ritchie" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Lohr, "Dennis Ritchie, Programming Trailblazer, Dies at 70", The New York Times, October 12, 2011; Lohr, "Dennis Ritchie, Programming Trailblazer, Dies at 70", The New York Times, October 12, 2011 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Brock, "Discovering Dennis Ritchie's Lost Dissertation", Computer History Museum (CHM), 2020-06-19. facts only, no text reused. computerhistory.org
Wikipedia, "Dennis Ritchie" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: van Renesse, "The First SIGOPS Dennis M. Ritchie Doctoral Dissertation Award", ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review, January 2014, p. 100; Brock, "Discovering Dennis Ritchie's Lost Dissertation", Computer History Museum (CHM), 2020-06-19; Brock, "Discovering Dennis Ritchie's Lost Dissertation", Computer History Museum (CHM), 2020-06-19; Brailsford, "How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery", 2022 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Dennis Ritchie" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Musil, "Dennis Ritchie, father of C programming language, dies", cnet, October 13, 2011 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Dennis Ritchie" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Keister, "The Design of Switching Circuits", D. Van Nostrand Co., inc., 1951; Miller, "Pioneer Programmer Shaped the Evolution of Computers", Wall Street Journal, 2011-10-14; Keill, "Berkeley Heights man wins Japan Prize for inventing UNIX operating system", Independent Press, February 1, 2011; Miller, "Pioneer Programmer Shaped the Evolution of Computers", Wall Street Journal, 2011-10-14 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Dennis Ritchie" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System", Bell Laboratories, October 1984; Ritchie, "The Development of the C Language", Bell Labs, April 1993 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia, "Dennis Ritchie" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Pioneer Programmer Shaped the Evolution of Computers", Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2011, p.A7; McIlroy, "A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986", 1987 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
Benet, "Interview With Dennis M. Ritchie", LinuxFocus.org, 1999. facts only, no text reused. linuxfocus.org
Wikipedia, "Dennis Ritchie" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Benet, "Interview With Dennis M. Ritchie", LinuxFocus.org, 1999 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
"Unix creator Dennis Ritchie dies aged 70", BBC News, October 13, 2011. facts only, no text reused. bbc.co.uk

Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Dennis Ritchie (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.