Father of C Programming and UNIX, Dennis Ritchie Dead at 70

Dennis Ritchie, one of the biggest contributors to the world of computer science, passed away on 12^th October 2011. He gifted the world with UNIX and C programming and changed the outset of computer programming with his contributions. He has been suffering from illness for a long time and died at his residence last Wednesday. The programming arena is sure going to miss this great person.

He was the father of C programming and one of the key developers in the UNIX development team. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie developed C programming in 1970 when he was working with Bell Labs. With his new venture onto C programming he gifted several other elements like I/O libraries which are now widely in use. C has been the oldest programming language and the predecessor to several related programming languages. Even though C language is less prevalent these days and used mainly for low level OS and device driver programming, the aspects of C programming can be seen in many new languages. One of its direct descendants is C++ which is now widely used as a popular programming language. Others like C#, Java etc still have elements adopted from the basic C programming.

Ritchie was born in 1941 in New York and was a graduate in BS and PhD in Physics. He joined Bell Labs in 1968. Prior to joining Bell Labs, he was associated with the team that was into building computer operating system. Along with Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, they worked together to develop UNIX and released it in 1971. It was the development of UNIX that paved way for Ritchie to develop C programming. Ritchie converted UNIX into C language which was initially written in assembly language.

UNIX is one of the most popular operating systems and has influenced the computer world to even influencing the development of MAC OS. UNIX was one of the earliest open source OS and was given free of license to universities and commercial purposes. In the 1980, the UNIX code went major transformations and several branches of UNIX came into being with BSD UNIX, Solaris and many others. UNIX paved way for the GNU and LINUX. LINUX and Windows have all taken inspiration from UNIX and are now the most popular operating systems. Even after making such significant changes in the world of computer science, Ritchie was never a noted figure nor in the limelight.

Ritchie received several recognitions for his contributions like the Turing Award in 1983 and the National Medal of Technology in 1998. He served as the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department till he retired from his job in 2007. His memories still remain with us through one of the best programming books that the world has ever witnessed.  He started the work of the book ‘The C programming Language (K & R)” 15 years back and he has left his mark on the world of technology and the technical world is immensely thankful to him for his contributions.