Dennis Ritchie, Creator of Unix and C, Dies at 70
One of the most influential figures in the history of computing, Dennis Ritchie, has passed away at the age of 70 after a long illness.
Ritchie is credited with creating the programming language C, one of the most widely used and influential languages today. He was also one of the creators of operating system UNIX, whose variants — most notably Linux and OS X — are also widely used today.
Ritchie, often referenced as dmr (a part of his email address that he used in various technical discussion groups), has had an immense influence on the computing world. Among his many accomplishments is a Turing award that he received in 1983 (together with Ken Thompson) for his work on UNIX, and the National Medal of Technology, which he received in 1999 (again, jointly with Thompson).
Programmers will perhaps best remember Ritchie for his famous “hello, world” program, which is used in many programming textbooks, even those that don’t pertain to C, as an example of a very simple computer program.
via BBC
Image courtesy of Wikipedia
RIP, Dennis.
Were Dennis Ritchie’s last words, “goodbye, world” then? (too soon?)
RIP , Dennis…
R.I.P
It’s amazing how prolific a really extraordinary programmer can be. RIP
R.I.P.
maybe.. steve recruited him :p
Repost from commenter on TechCrunch:
“This sucks. For all those non-techies: Without Ritchie, we would not have iOS for the iPhones, the Mac operating system and no basis for Java within the Android phones. Steve Jobs who passed away last week definitely stood on the shoulder of giants and this man was one of those giants. We lost two great tech leaders. Their impact was huge!”
Oh noes :-(
Never knew the “Hello, world” was his “tag”.. Respect for the things this man has created. His creation made the tech/computing-world as it is today. May he rest in peace.
RIP Ritchie.
I think this is coincidental, interesting, and strange. First, Steve Jobs, one of Apple’s co-founders, dies on October 5. Mac OS X is a variant of UNIX according to this article. Then, over one week since Jobs died, Ritchie (a man credited with UNIX) dies.
:(
I used Unix in college
Really wondering why this didn’t show up in my RSS Live Links feed. For a moment, I almost thought you guys didn’t report on this. Glad to see that you did. It’s a shame he’s not getting as much media attention the web over as Jobs, though.
We need more like him
I hope to see as many articles about this great man as this site has been posting about Steve Jobs.