Remembering Dennis Ritchie: The Father of C and UNIX.
“It’s funny how fickle fame can be. One week Steve Jobs dies and his death tops the news agendas in dozens of countries. Just over a week later, Dennis Ritchie dies and nobody — except for a few geeks — notices. And yet his work touched the lives of far more people than anything Steve Jobs ever did. In fact, if you’re reading this online then the chances are that the router which connects you to the internet is running a descendant of the software that Ritchie and his colleague Ken Thompson created in 1969” [1]
Nine years ago, On October 12th, 2011, Dennis Ritchie left this world after a long battle on cancer, one week after Steve Jobs died. Dennis Ritchie created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. If you are not a computer geek then you can think of the two men in the following way. If Steve Jobs were to be the maestro who painted the beauty of nature in a renaissance masterpiece, then Dennis Ritchie would be the god who created that beauty in the first place.
Dennis Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with Ph.D. degrees(*) in physics and applied mathematics. He was a genius who lived ahead of his time, the Da Vinci of Computer Programming, and the Picasso of Computer Operating Systems. Sadly, just like many of the geniuses of his kind, Dennis walked a lonely path out of this world as he was found dead, alone, in his home at the age of 70 after a long battle with prostate cancer and heart disease [1].
“Ritchie and Thompson — usually together — received many honours and awards, culminating with the National Medal of Science awarded by President Bill Clinton in 1998. The citation described their inventions as having “led to enormous advances in hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated the growth of an entire industry”. Earlier this year, the pair won a Japan prize. Ritchie spent all his career at Bell Labs, retiring as head of systems software research in 2007. He is survived by two brothers and a sister” [2]
Thank you Dennis for C, thank you for UNIX, and thank you for everything else, May your soul rest In Peace.
References
- Dennis Ritchie: the other man inside your iPhone
- Dennis Ritchie obituary
- Dennis Ritchie on Wikipedia, (*) It says he did not officially get his Ph.D.
