Remembering Dennis Ritchie, Creator of the C Programming Language and UNIX Co-Creator

Dennis M. Ritchie, co-creator of  UNIX and father of the  C programming language, died this past weekend after a long illness. It's no exaggeration to say that without Ritchie, modern computing would not be what it is today.

Often known as "dmr," Ritchie was born in Bronxville, NY in 1941. He studied at Harvard University, initially focusing on physics. Ritchie said that he entered computing because "my undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat."

Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967 and worked with a group of developers, including Ken Thompson, to create UNIX, the first version of which was released in 1969. Initially called UNICS (following a system called MULTICS) was written in a low-level assembly language by Thompson. According to Thompson, Ritchie's contribution to UNIX was "mostly on the language and the I/O system."