Dennis Ritchie

He received his Bachelor's and advanced degrees at Harvard University. As a student his interests were Physics and later on Applied Mathematics. His experiences at Harvard made Ritchie believe that he was not smart enough to be a physicist. He also admitted that he was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms. However he thought that computers were quite neat and he liked procedural languages better than functional ones.

In 1967 Ritchie joined Bell Labs, just like his father Alistair E. Ritchie had done before him. Working at Bell Labs he got involved with the Multics project, which could be called the predecessor of UNIX. At least it was their experience with this project that led to many of the concepts and ideas, that Ken Thompson and Ritchie would want to see in an operation system.

When Thompson first started to work on UNIX he used his own programming language he had named B. Adding data types and new syntax elements to this language Ritchie created C. The early versions of UNIX were mostly used internally by Bell Labs. The first version that was distributed commercially was the Seventh Edition known as Unix System V.

The C programming language was a key factor for UNIX's success, because it made the OS portable to other systems, as soon as a C compiler was available on the target platform. Also a vast amount of applications were and still are written in C and its object oriented successor C++. C was even standardised by ANSI and ISO.

Ritchie and Thompson received several awards for their work on UNIX and papers published. Among them are the IEEE Emmanuel Piore Award (1982), ACM Turing Award(1983), ACM Software Systems Award (1983) and IEEE Hamming Medal (1990).

In 1995 a new operation system called Plan 9 was released. This OS was developed by a team at Bell Labs under the lead of Ritchie. It does feature some interesting new ideas for distributed environments and integration of objects into the filesystem hierarchies beyond that which was accomplished with UNIX.

Ritchie considers Bell Labs to be a good place to do work that has enduring impact for the long run and thus still work there in the Computing Sciences Research Centre.