Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie ( September 9, 1941- ) is a computer scientist notable for his influence on ALTRAN , B, BCPL, C, Multics, and UNIX.
Born in Bronxville, New York, Ritchie graduated from Harvard with degrees in physics and applied mathematics. In 1967Events January January 4 British motorboat racer Donald Campbell dies while attempting a water speed record in Coniston Lake. January 4 Algerian revolutionary Mohammed Khider is shot in Madrid. January 6 Vietnam War: USMC and ARVN troops launch " Operatio, he began working at the Bell Labs' Computing Sciences Research CenterBell Telephone Laboratories or Bell Labs was originally the research and development arm of the United States Bell System, and was the premier corporate facility of its type, developing a range of revolutionary technologies from telephone switches to spec; he is currently the head of Lucent Technologies' System Software Research DepartmentIn 1996, AT&T spun off its Systems and Technology units, along with the famous Bell Laboratories, to form a new company named Lucent Technologies . One of the primary reasons for the spinoff was to allow AT&T's equipment manufacturing business to profit f. In 1983Events January January 1 Beat Raaflaub became Basel Boys Choir's new conductor January 1 the ARPANET officially changes to use the Internet Protocol, creating the Internet. January 1 compulsory wearing of seat belts becomes law in the UK. January 2 The mu, he and Ken Thompson jointly received the Turing award "for their development of generic operating systemIn computing, an operating system OS is the system software responsible for the direct control and management of hardware and basic system operations, as well as running application software such as word processing programs and web browsers. In general, ts theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system."
1 C and UNIX
When asked what influenced him in developing C in the manner he did, Ritchie has been quoted to have said that it "looked like a good thing to do", and that anyone else in the same place at the same time would have done the same thing. Many, however, have said that this is part of Ritchie's modest personality. One of his Bell Labs colleagues, Bjarne StroustrupBjarne Stroustrup (born 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark) is a computer scientist and the College of Engineering Chair Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He is most notable for developing the C++ programming language. Stroustrup, in his own wor, who developed and designed the C++ programming language, an object oriented version of C, has been quoted to have said that "If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn". Indeed, being the inventor of the C programming language, as well as co-inventor of the UNIX operating system alongside Ken Thompson, Richie has earned an important position in the history of the computer industry. C is still widely used today in application and operating system development and its influence can be seen in many more recent programming languages such as C++, Java, C# and JavaScript. In the operating system world, UNIX is also quite influential; there are many dialects of it available on the market today, such as AIX, Solaris, and Minix, as well as the popular Linux Operating System which is considered to be the crowning achievement of the open source and free software movements. Indeed, even Microsoft, whose Windows operating systems compete with UNIX, has developed UNIX compatibility tools and C compilers for users and developers of their products.
