On this day: Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C language and co-author of Unix, died

On October 12, 2011, Dennis Ritchie was found dead at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey. He was 70 years old. The American computer scientist created the C language and, together with Ken Thompson, took part in creating the Unix operating system.

Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941, in Bronxville, New York, into the family of a Bell Labs scientist. In 1963 he graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics, and in 1967 he began working at the Bell Labs research center.

In the 1960s he took part in the development of the Multics system. Then Ken Thompson assembled his own operating system on an old PDP-7 machine, and Ritchie helped him in this work. The name Unix was proposed in 1970 by Brian Kernighan. The B language, created by Thompson, was succeeded by the C language, which Ritchie wrote.

C is widely used in application programs, operating systems and embedded devices. The language influenced many modern languages, among them C++, Objective-C, C# and Java.

Together with Thompson, Ritchie received the Turing Award in 1983. The book The C Programming Language, written with Brian Kernighan, is still read as a classic.

The Fedora 16 and FreeBSD 9.0 releases came out dedicated to his memory.

Ritchie also worked on the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and in 2007 he retired from Lucent Technologies.

Image: Denise Panyik-Dale CC BY 2.0 · License

Translation editors: Соловьев В., Пеков А.