Remembering Dennis Ritchie

Although very familiar with Bjarne Stroustrup as the inventor of C++, I am sad to say that, until this week, I did not have the name of Dennis Ritchie and his achievements committed to memory. However, his achievements have been some of the greatest contributions to computer science and development which the world continues to feel today. At this point if you, like me, were once unfamiliar with Dennis Ritchie, let's learn a little bit more about this man and what he did for us all.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (username: dmr) was born September 8, 1941 in Bronxville NY. He attended Harvard University and left with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1968 he earned his Ph.D. He started work at Bell Labs in 1967 in the Computing Sciences Research Center where he worked on the famous project Multics. When Multics was cancelled, the team then decided to redo the project on a smaller scale stating

What we wanted to preserve was not just a good environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a fellowship could form. We knew from experience that the essence of communal computing, as supplied by remote-access, time-shared machines, is not just to type programs into a terminal instead of a keypunch, but to encourage close communication.

This created what is today known as UNIX.

During the development of UNIX, around 1972, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie wanted to port the operating system to a PDP-11. However, B was unable to take advantage of some of the PDP-11's features, notably byte addressability, so they decided to develop C. In 1973, C had become robust enough that UNIX's kernel was mostly written in C which gave rise to the first portable operating system.

In 1978 Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie published the first book on C called The C Programming Language from which we get the genesis of the "Hello World" code sample. Consequently, almost all of today's programming languages can be traced back to or have been influenced by C. Today, almost all computer operating systems are written in C or some derivative of the language. Without the invention of the C computer languages, development may have ended up a lot differently.

Sadly, this weekend, Dennis Ritchie left us. It was first reported by Rob Pike via Google+ that the computer scientist had passed due to a long battle with an unspecified illness. Although he may not be as well known as other pop celebrities who have died in the past year, there is no doubt in my mind that this man's achievement has influenced and changed our world more than any entertainer could ever warrant. So on that note, we say good bye to a great and brilliant man.

RIP
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
1941-2011