Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – October 12, 2011), commonly known by his username dmr, was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague, Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. The 'R' of the K&R C book stands for his name.

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, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the 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.

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.

Historical Timeline for Dennis Ritchie :