Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie was an American computer scientist who created the C programming language and, together with Ken Thompson, co-created the Unix operating system at Bell Labs. Ritchie developed C in the early 1970s as a successor to an earlier language called B, designing it to be powerful enough to write an entire operating system in while remaining close to the underlying machine, and he used it to rewrite Unix itself, making the system far more portable across different computer hardware than it had been. The 1978 book The C Programming Language, which Ritchie co-authored with Brian Kernighan, became the standard reference for the language and shaped programming practice for decades afterward, since C and its direct descendants went on to underlie a large share of the software industry, including most subsequent operating systems. Ritchie and Thompson jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 for their development of Unix, and Ritchie continued research at Bell Labs, including work on the later Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, until his retirement.