Dennis Ritchie is a well-known computer scientist for his extraordinary mind with his wonderful contributions on computer science. He is the father of C language and the co-inventor of popular operating system Unix with Kenneth Thompson. Widely regarded as one of the fastest and the most stable operating systems available, Unix forms the basis for a very high percentage of scientific and business computer networks. It also serves as the foundation for the increasingly popular Linux operating system.
For their contribution on Unix , they were awarded with the prestigious Turing Award in 1983.
Brief biography of Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie
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Born
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September 9, 1941(1941-09-09)
Bronxville, New York, U.S.
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Died
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October 12, 2011(2011-10-12)
Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, U.S.
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Fields
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Computer science
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Institutions
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Lucent Technologies
Bell Labs
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Alma mater
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Harvard University
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Known for
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ALTRAN
B
BCPL
C
Multics
Unix
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Notable awards
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Turing Award
National Medal of Technology
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Dennis Ritchie wrote some words on his autobiography on the Bell Labs site:
I was born Sept. 9, 1941 in Bronxville, N.Y., and received Bachelor's and advanced degrees from Harvard University, where as an undergraduate I concentrated in Physics and as a graduate student in Applied Mathematics. The subject of my 1968 doctoral thesis was subrecursive hierarchies of functions. I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era.
Soon after, I contributed to the Multics project, then a joint effort of Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric. I helped with a compiler for the BCPL language on the Multics machine (GE 645) and on the GE 635 under the GECOS system. Also, I wrote the compiler for ALTRAN, a language and system for symbolic calculation.
Subsequently, I aided Ken Thompson in creating the Unix operating system. After Unix had become well established in the Bell System and in a number of educational, government and commercial installations, Steve Johnson and I (helped by Ken) transported the operating system to the Interdata 8/32, thus demonstrating its portability, and laying the groundwork for the widespread growth of Unix: the Seventh Edition version from the Bell Labs research group was the basis for commercial Unix System V and also for the Unix BSD distributions from the University of California at Berkeley. The last important technical contribution I made to Unix was the Streams mechanism for interconnecting devices, protocols, and applications. Early in the development of Unix, I added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language, thus producing the new language C. C was the foundation for the portability of Unix, but it has become widely used in other contexts as well; much application and system development for computers of all sizes, from hand-held to supercomputer, uses it. There are unified U.S. and international standards for the language, and it is the basis for Stroustrup's work on its descendant C++.
C and Unix
Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, a key developer of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, and was the 'R' in K&R (a common reference to the book's authors Kernighan and Ritchie). Ritchie worked together with Ken Thompson, the scientist credited with writing the original Unix; one of Ritchie's most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.
The C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. UNIX has also been influential, establishing concepts and principles that are now precepts of computing.
Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability."It adds that "Ritchie designed a computer language, C, that could be quickly and easily moved between different hardware. Programs that were written in C, provided they followed the rules, would then run with little or no modification on any computer that could itself run C."
Then Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson "rewrote Unix in C, giving the operating system the same ease of portability. Programmers could then learn one operating system, one set of tools and one language, and find those skills nearly universally applicable."
Ritchie was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988 for "development of the 'C' programming language and for co-development of the UNIX operating system."
By creating C, Ritchie gave birth to the concept of open systems. C was developed so they could port Unix to any computer, and so that programs written on one platform (and the skills used to develop them) could be easily transferred to another.
In that way, Ritchie has shaped our world in much more fundamental ways than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have. What sets him apart from them is that he did it all not in a quest for wealth or fame, but just out of intellectual curiosity. Unix and C were the product of pure research—research that started as a side-project using equipment bought based on a promise that Ritchie and Thompson would develop a word processor.Imagine what the world would be like if they had just stuck to that promise. What would your life be like without C or Unix?
After Dennis Ritchie's death in early October, 2011. His sister and brothers left a note on Bell Lab site:
As Dennis's siblings, Lynn, John, and Bill Ritchie--on behalf of the entire Ritchie family--we wanted to convey to all of you how deeply moved, astonished, and appreciative we are of the loving tributes to Dennis that we have been reading. We can confirm what we keep hearing again and again:
Dennis was an unfailingly kind, sweet, unassuming, and generous brother--and of course a complete geek. He had a hilariously dry sense of humor, and a keen appreciation for life's absurdities--though his world view was entirely devoid of cynicism or mean-spiritedness.
We are terribly sad to have lost him, but touched beyond words to realize what a mark he made on the world, and how well his gentle personality--beyond his accomplishments--seems to be understood. Lynn, John, and Bill Ritchie
Finally, my small piece of C code is dedicated to Dennis Ritchie:
Caution !!! execute this program on your own risk. It will print "Dennis Ritchie is father of C language" forever.
References:
http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news-HPC-Dennis-Ritchie-Computer-programming-Pioneer-Dies-101711.aspx
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/chist.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/bigbio1st.html
http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/
http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Mi-So/Ritchie-Dennis.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2011/10/dennis-ritchie/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/dennis-ritchie-founder-of-unix-and-c-dies-at-70/2011/10/13/gIQAXsVXiL_story.html
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/d/dennis_ritchie.html
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2011/10/13/141316217/dennis-ritchie-c-programmer-and-unix-co-creator-has-died
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