Dennis Ritchie

About

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist.

He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language . Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.

Learn more about him in this Wiki article.

He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr.

Timeline and contributions

• Sep 9, 1941

  Born in Bronxville NY

• Jan 1, 1967

  Ritchie started working at Bell Labs in 1967. Here is where he worked on Multics operating system.

• May 1, 1968

  Ritchie earned his bachelor's degree in Physics in 1963, and completed his Doctorate degree in Mathematics in 1968 from Harvard University.

• Jan 1, 1969

  Bell Labs dropped the Multics operating systems project in 1969. This prompted Ritchie to develop C programming language and, with Thompson, create the UNIX operating system.

• Nov 3, 1971

  Unix was released on November 3rd, 1971, opening a operating system to work on a variety of platforms with highly adapted quality.

• Jan 1, 1972

  Ritchie and Thompson's operating system was not functioning on the more advanced PDP-11 mini computer in 1971. This prompted Ritchie to create C programming lanuage. C programming lanuage is very popular and important to the development of software including programs such as C++ and Java.

• Jan 1, 1973

  Ritchie and Thompson wrote UNIX using C programming language. This allowed for UNIX to work a wide variety of computers in a range of large and minicomputers and advanced to simple computers.

• Jan 1, 1983

  Cowinner (with Ken Thompson) of the A.M. Turing Award. It is a prestigious award and the top achievement in Computer Science. They recieved this award for, "their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system" (Hosch).

• Jan 1, 1988

  Ritchie was elected into the U.S National Academy of Engineering in 1988.

• Jan 1, 1990

  Ritchie was appointed the head of the System Software Research Department at Bell Labs in 1990.

• Jan 1, 1994

  Awarded the 1994 Computer Pioneer Award, "In recognition of contribution to the development of Unix" (Dennis).

• Jan 1, 1995

  In 1995 Ritchie (and his team) released Plan 9 operating system. Plan 9 attempted to integrate graphics and networking into a Unix platform. "They kept the Unix choice to mediate access to as many system services as possible through a single big file-hierarchy name space" (Plan 9).

• Apr 1, 1996

  Ritchie (with team members) released the inferno Operating System in April 1996. Inferno is a operating system for building distributed and networked systems on a large range of platforms and systems. "You can fectch it now as Free Software, on similar terms to Linux orxBSD" (Inferno).

• Apr 21, 1999

  Richie and Thompson are awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology Award from President Bill Clinton for inventing UNIX and C programming language.

• Oct 12, 2011

  Death

Some quotes

• UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity.

• C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success.

• Life's a bitch and then your feet wear down.