Dennis Ritchie R.I.P.

I missed this bit of sad news earlier in the week. Dennis Ritchie is dead.

This may not mean much to hoi polloi but to us techno nerds, this guy was probably more important than Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and quite a few others.

He was one of the co-creators of the Unix operating system. Big deal, you may say, but most of the Internet is based around varieties of Unix. Most main internet companies use it for their servers and infrastructure, e.g. Google, and even Microsoft used it for a long time, until they finally got Windows servers working properly. As I also pointed out in an earlier post, Android, iOS and MacOS are all based on versions of Unix.

He was also the co-creator of the ‘C’ programming language, the language that Unix is written in and which, either in its original form or its derivatives, most of the utilities that control the internet are written. I still have an old, well-thumbed copy of “The C programming Language” by Kernighan and Ritchie lurking somewhere in the attic!

It is sad to see a lot of the computer pioneers dying off, but at least they leave a huge legacy.

4 thoughts on “Dennis Ritchie R.I.P.”

  1. Now there was a real engineering innovator!
    ‘C’ – the first high level low-level language!
    Great chap. R.I.P.
    šŸ˜€

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