Dennis Ritchie: Creator of C language, key UNIX collaborator

Born in Bronxville, New York, to Alistair E. Ritchie, scientist at Bell Labs who co-authored The Design of Switching Circuits, Dennis was still a child when his family shifted base to Summit, New Jersey where he attended the Summit High School. He did graduation in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard.

Career
The late 1960s were the years when Ritchie joined the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Centre in 1967.

In 1968, he successfully defended the PhD thesis on Computational Complexity and Program Structure at Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer. But he did not officially get the PhD degree due to the failure to submit a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library that was a mandatory requirement. Last year, the Computer History Museum helped tracked the copy of Ritchie’s lost dissertation.

At Bell Labs, Rictchie and Ken Thompson joined hands to work on the Multics operating system. Thompson developed his own version of application programs and operating system with help from others including Ritchie. It was Brian Kernighan who, in 1970, mooted the name Unix.

C & Unix
Ritchie is part of Computer programming history for his achievement as the creator of the C programming language, apart from which he was also among the handful of key people who developed the Unix operating system and co-authored along with Kermighan the book titled The C Programming Language. While Thomson wrote the original version of Unix, Ritchie’s vital role included porting it to diverse platforms and machines.

The significance of C language can be appreciated from the fact that it is employed in application, operating system as well as embedded system development and most modern programming languages bear its influence. It also rang in fundamental changes to the manner in which programs were written. Modern software is written using one of C’s more evolved dialects such as Objective-C by Apple, C# by Microsoft, and Java, which is widely used in Internet applications. Ritchie and Thompson employed C to write UNIX which helped establish computing concepts and principles.

Ritchie said in an interview that he regards Linux and BSD operating systems as derivatives of Unix. He added that both Unix and Linux, took forward the ideas that Thompson and he had put forward several years ago.

In the mid-1990s, Ritchie was transferred to Lucent Technologies as part of a restructuring at AT&T. He retired at Lucent in 2007 as head of System Software Research Department. Ritchie passed away in October 2011, aged 70 at his home in New Jersey.

Awards & Recognition
In 1983, Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award by the Association for Computer Machinery In 1990, the duo received the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) Richard W. Hamming Medal. Nine years later, then US President Bill Clinton honoured Ritchie and Thompson with the National Medal of Technology. In 2005, the Industrial Research Institute awarded Ritchie the Achievement Award. In 2011, Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications.

INTERESTING FACTS

• Aptly summing up Ritchie’s lifetime achievements, computer historian Paul E Ceruzzi stated immediately after Ritchie’s death: “Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but… if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you’d see his work everywhere inside. “ Similarly, Martin Rinard, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, stated: “(Steve) Jobs was the king of the visible and Ritchie is the king of what is largely invisible. Jobs’ genius is that he builds these products that people really like to use because he has taste and can build things that people really find compelling. Ritchie built things that technologists were able to use to build core infrastructure that people don’t necessarily see much anymore, but they use everyday.”
• Asteroid 294727 Dennisritchie, discovered by astronomers Tom Glinos and Devid Levy in 2008, was named in his memory. The official naming citation was published by the Minor Planet Center on Feb. 7, 2012.