Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie father of Unix and an esteemed computer scientist died last weekend at the age of 70.Ritchie also known as dmr is best know for creating the C programming language as well as being instrumental in the development of UNIX along with Ken Thompson.

Ritchie spent most of his career at Bell Labs which at the time of his joining in 1967 was one of the largest phone providers in the US.and had one of the most well known research labs in operation.Working alongside Thompson at Bell in the late sixties, the two men set out to develop a more efficient operating system for the up and coming minicomputer, resulting in the release of Unix in 1971.

Though Unix was cheap and compatible with just about any machine allowing users to install a variety of software systems the OS was written in machine language, meaning that it had a small vocabulary and suffered in relation to memory.By 1973 Ritchie and Thompson had rewritten Unix in C, developing its syntax, functionality and beyond to give the language the ability to program an operating system. The kernel was published in the same year.

Read More at: techcrunch.com

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