RIP: Dennis Ritchie, who created the C programming language and co-created the Unix operating system, has died at age 70.
After attending Harvard and MIT, where he first encountered computers, Richie landed at Bell Labs in 1967. Bell was phasing out its Multics operating system, so Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson wrote Unix to replace it. Unix became popular within Bell Labs, and made its public debut in 1973.
Ritchie created C in the mid-’70s as a programming language that could be used on the diverse hardware of the time, meaning programmers didn’t have to rewrite their software for every available machine. He and Thompson rewrote Unix in C, paving the way for modern operating systems.
Later in his life, Ritchie ran Lucent Technology Systems’ software research department. He retired in 2007.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Ritchie’s contributions made many of today’s programming languages and operating systems possible.
[zdnet]
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