Dennis Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co … See more

In 1967, Ritchie began working at the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center. In 1968, he defended his PhD thesis on "Computational Complexity and Program Structure" at Harvard under the supervision of … See more

Ritchie created the C programming language and was one of the developers of the Unix operating system. With Brian Kernighan, he co-wrote the book The C Programming Language, which is often referred to … See more

In 1983, Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system". Ritchie's Turing Award lect… See more

Ritchie was found dead on October 12, 2011, at the age of 70 at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he lived alone. First news of his death came from his former colleague, Rob Pike. He had been in frai… See more

Following Ritchie's death, computer historian Paul E. Ceruzzi stated:
Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but... if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, … See more