Dennis Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. His father was Alistair E. Ritchie, a longtime Bell Labs scientist and co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits on switching circuit theory. As a child, Dennis moved with his … See more

In 1983, Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the … 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 frail health for several years following treatment for 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" … 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, … See more

Following Ritchie's death, computer historian Paul E. Ceruzzi stated:
Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household … See more

• B language
• C language on which many succeeding languages and technologies are based.
• Unix multiuser operating system. Several workalikes (commonly referred to as Unix-like systems) have been developed based on Unix's design. … See more