Computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie dead at 70

Sam Varghese
Friday, 14 October 2011 08:17

IT People - Enterprise

One of the truly great programmers of the last century and a man who maintained that simplicity was the best way to tackle the task has died.

Dennis Ritchie, one half of the duo that is identified with the creation of the UNIX operating system, and the person who invented the C programming language, two indispensable tools in the march of computing, is reported to have died at the age of 70.

Ritchie began working at Bell Labs in 1967; Ken Thompson, who is known as the other half of the team that developed UNIX, had joined a year earlier. The pair originally developed UNIX in 1969.

Others like Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna also contributed to the system that served as the inspiration for a later generation of programmers like BSD pioneers Bill Joy and Marshall McKusick and Linux creator Linus Torvalds.

UNIX came about because the operating system that AT&T Bell Labs, along with MIT and GE, had developed in the 1960s, Multics, had many problems despite introducing a number of innovations. A small group decided to redo things on a much smaller scale.

Ritchie is also known for having co-authored the book on C, The C Programming Language, along with Kernighan.

His achievements earned him the Turing Award in 1983. He was also awarded the US National Medal of Technology for 1998.

He was head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.
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