Unix creator Dennis Ritchie dies

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13 October 2011 Last updated at 14:22 GMT Dr Ritchie (middle) and Mr Thompson were awarded the US National Medal of Technology for their work on Unix Pioneering computer scientist Dennis Ritchie has died after a long illness.

Dr Ritchie was one of the creators of the hugely influential Unix operating system and the equally pioneering C programming language.

A vast number of modern technologies depend on the work he and fellow programmers did on Unix and C in the early days of the computer revolution.

Those paying respects said he was a "titan" of the industry whose influence was largely unknown.

The first news of Dr Ritchie's death came via Rob Pike, a former colleague who worked with him at Bell Labs. Mr Ritchie's passing was then confirmed in a statement from Alcatel Lucent which now owns Bell Labs.

Jeong Kim, president of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, said Dr Ritchie would be "greatly missed".

"He was truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man," said Mr Kim.

Along with Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna, Dr Ritchie was one of the key creators of the Unix operating system at Bell Labs during the 1960s and 70s.

Unix's influence has been felt in many ways. It established many software engineering principles that persist until today; it was the OS of choice for the internet; it kicked off the open source movement and has been translated to run on many different types of hardware.

It was also at Bell that Dr Ritchie created C, one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. It is familiar to almost every modern-day developer.

In 1999, Dr Ritchie's influence and accomplishments won official notice when he was awarded the US National Medal of Technology - the highest honour America can bestow on a technologist.

Mr Pike said that with his passing, the world had lost a "truly great mind."

Paying tribute on his blog, Google programmer Tim Bray said it was impossible to overstate the debt his profession owed to Dennis Ritchie.

"I've been living in a world he helped invent for over thirty years," he wrote.

On Twitter, developer James Grimmelman said: "Ritchie's influence rivals Jobs's; it's just less visible."

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Dennis Ritchie, C Programmer And Unix Co-Creator, Has Died

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Dennis Ritchie is being remembered today as a pioneering computer scientist, the "father of [the] C programming language," co-creator of the Unix operating system and "a 'titan' of the [computer] industry whose influence was largely unknown."

Ritchie, 70, has died. The news was confirmed this morning by Alcatel-Lucent, which owns the Bell Labs where Ritchie worked from 1967 until his retirement in 2007.

ZDnet writes that:

"While the introduction of Intel's 4004 microprocessor in 1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity and portability."

It adds that "Ritchie designed a computer language, C, that could be quickly and easily moved between different hardware. Programs that were written in C, provided they followed the rules, would then run with little or no modification on any computer that could itself run C."

Then Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson "rewrote Unix in C, giving the operating system the same ease of portability. Programmers could then learn one operating system, one set of tools and one language, and find those skills nearly universally applicable."

Bell Labs.

Dennis Ritchie at the 1999 ceremony when he received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton.

Ritchie and Thompson were 1998 National Medal of Technology laureates "for their invention of UNIX operating system and the C programming language, which together have led to enormous growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age."

That medal "is the highest honor for technological achievement bestowed by the President of the United States on America's leading innovators."

Alcatel-Lucent has posted video of Ritchie and Thompson talking about their work.

Update at 1:15 p.m. ET. Our thanks to commenter Johnny Truant (Johnny_Truant) for writing:

     #include ?stdio.h?
int main(void)
{
printf("goodbye, world\n");

     return 0;
}

Those who know C language, NPR senior programmer Jason Grosman tells us, will recognize that play on "the very common Hello World program that almost everyone writes as their first program."

A fitting send off, it would seem.

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Dennis Ritchie, A Hero Of The Computer World, Dies

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An unsung hero of the computer world has died. Dennis Ritchie created the C language — which is the foundation for most computers, including the iPad and iPhone.

Copyright © 2011 National Public Radio®. For personal, noncommercial use only. See Terms of Use. For other uses, prior permission required.

GUY RAZ, host: It's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Guy Raz.

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: And I'm Robert Siegel.

If you read something on a computer today, you did it in part thanks to Dennis Ritchie. He's known as the father of the Unix operating system and the C programming language. Ritchie died on Saturday after a long illness. He was 70 years old.

And as we here from NPR's Laura Sydell, Ritchie helped make modern computing possible.

LAURA SYDELL: It's hard to imagine today, but in the 1970s when someone wrote a computer software program, they had to limit it to working on one computer or spend a lot of time readapting it to every single device. The work of Dennis Ritchie helped change that. He and his colleague, Kenneth Thompson, were working at Bell Labs when they developed a computer language they called simply C. It could be moved easily between different computers. But in a video by Bell Labs, Ritchie said that wasn't the only reasoning behind it.

DENNIS RITCHIE: Well, what we wanted to preserve was not just a good programming environment in which to do programming, but a system around which a community could form.

SYDELL: Ritchie and Thompson rewrote the existing Unix operating system in C. The descendants of Unix and C are countless, but include Linux, Android, Mac OS, Java Script and C++. Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York and grew up in New Jersey. He first encountered computers at Harvard, where he earned degrees in physics and mathematics. Then he went on to work at Bell Labs, where his father had worked. That's where Lawrence Cowsar met Ritchie.

LAWRENCE COWSAR: If you make a phone call on your cell phone or you use the Internet or make use of many applications, you will somewhere be using something that was written in the language that Dennis designed.

SYDELL: Cowsar says many programmers wanted jobs at Bell Labs just because they wanted to work with Dennis Ritchie.

COWSAR: Many of them bring in their hands sort of dog-eared copy of the book that Dennis wrote about the C programming language hoping for an autograph.

SYDELL: Cowsar says they met a man who was genuinely curious. He wanted to discover and invent things and solve interesting problems. And as a computer scientist in the 1960s and '70s, he had long hair and a beard, and even though he became a manager, Cowsar says Ritchie didn't think you should listen too much to management. Dennis Ritchie received the National Medal in Technology in 1999.

Laura Sydell, NPR News, San Francisco.

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