Dennis Ritchie, Creator of UNIX, Plan 9 and C Programming Language, Dies at 70

[Mark Karlfeldt]

Unix creator Dennis Ritchie dies aged 70

Mr Ritchie (middle) and Mr Thompson were awarded the US National Medal of Technology for their work on Unix

Pioneering computer scientist Dennis Ritchie has died after a long illness.

Mr Ritchie was one of the creators of the hugely influential Unix operating system and the equally pioneering C programming language.

A vast number of modern technologies depend on the work he and fellow programmers did on Unix and C in the early days of the computer revolution.

Those paying respects said he was a "titan" of the industry whose influence was largely unknown.

The first news of Mr Ritchie's death came via Rob Pike, a former colleague who worked with him at Bell Labs. Mr Ritchie's passing was then confirmed in a statement from Alcatel Lucent which now owns Bell Labs.

Jeong Kim, president of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, said Mr Ritchie would be "greatly missed".

"He was truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man," said Mr Kim.

Along with Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna, Mr Ritchie was one of the key creators of the Unix operating system at Bell Labs during the 1960s and 70s.

Unix's influence has been felt in many ways. It established many software engineering principles that persist until today; it was the OS of choice for the internet; it kicked off the open source movement and has been translated to run on many different types of hardware.

It was also at Bell that Mr Ritchie created C, one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. It is familiar to almost every modern-day developer.

In 1999, Mr Ritchie's influence and accomplishments won official notice when he was awarded the US National Medal of Technology - the highest honour America can bestow on a technologist.

Mr Pike said that with his passing, the world had lost a "truly great mind."

Paying tribute on his blog, Google programmer Tim Bray said it was impossible to overstate the debt his profession owed to Dennis Ritchie.

"I've been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years," he wrote.

On Twitter, developer James Grimmelman said: "Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible."

Most of you probably won't know (or care) about this man, but he was pretty much the founder of computing as we know it today, undoubtedly even more historically important than Steve Jobs.

UNIX was the forerunner of all modern operating systems. Mac OSX is based on it. Windows uses many elements of it. Linux grew from it. This man pretty much started the personal computer, by himself. And then because he wasn't already enough of a badass, he invented C, the programming language still in use today by a significant amount of software. Shit, LSL is based on C.

Edited October 13, 2011 by Mark Karlfeldt

[Inoue Katsu]

:(

[Tsume Xiao]

Looks like a bad month to be in the computer industry.

D:

*Edit*

Its really sad that many people will never even know who he was or that he died, despite the profound impact he has undoubtedly had on their day to day lives.

[Cygna]

:<

[Mark Karlfeldt]

Article posted in OP.