The October 2011 passing of Dennis Ritchie—creator of the C programming language and co-creator of the UNIX operating system—was largely overshadowed by Steve Jobs’ death the week prior. Yet Ritchie’s quiet genius laid the foundation for much of modern computing. Learn more about him in this edition of Pioneers in Tech.
As Smithsonian computer historian Paul Ceruzzi told The Washington Post on Oct. 13, 2011: “His name was not a household name at all, but … if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you’d see his work everywhere inside.”
That statement remains true more than a decade later. Ritchie and his long-time collaborator Ken Thompson revolutionized the tech world with their work.
From Bronxville to Bell Labs
Born Sept. 9, 1941, in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie had science in his genes. His father worked at Bell Laboratories, where Ritchie worked from the time he was a doctoral student at Harvard to his retirement four decades later in 2007. While at Bell, Ritchie contributed to Multics, a time-sharing operating system that Bell Labs developed in collaboration with MIT and General Electric. Bell Labs pulled out, though, and that left Ritchie looking for other work. To the benefit of us all, he began working with Thompson to develop a portable operating system that avoided a “big system mentality.” That project became UNIX, which was remarkable for innovations including a hierarchical file system (i.e., folders) and time-sharing capability—but contained less code and took less memory to run.
Thompson went on to develop the B programming language, which Ritchie evolved into the C programming language. C spawned an entire family of languages, including C++ and Java. The collaborators rewrote UNIX in C in 1973.
Their work was recognized with the industry’s highest honors, including the 1983 ACM Turing Award and the 1999 U.S. National Medal of Technology. The Computer History Museum named Ritchie a Fellow in 1997.
Ritchie and Thompson had a lot of fun along the way, even enlisting Penn and Teller to help them play a prank on their boss. Watch the results on YouTube, marvel that the technology behind the prank still exists today
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Photo: SeventyFour / Shutterstock
This post originally appeared on Smarter MSP.