Biography
Dennis Ritchie
- Born
- 9 September 1941
- Died
- 12 October 2011
- Nationality
- American
- Known for
- The C programming language, Co-creating the Unix operating system
Dennis Ritchie is one of the quietest giants in computing. He wrote no famous product and founded no company, yet the C programming language and the Unix operating system, both largely his work, sit underneath a huge share of the software running in the world today. When he died in 2011, one obituary noted that he had built the house that everyone else lives in.
Working at Bell Labs in the early 1970s, Ritchie designed C as a language that was efficient and close to the machine, but still portable from one type of computer to another. That combination was new, and it proved enormously useful. He and Ken Thompson then rewrote Unix, which they had built together, in C, so that the operating system could move to new hardware instead of being tied to one machine.
The consequences are hard to overstate. Unix and its descendants, including Linux and the systems inside macOS and Android, run most of the internet and most of the world’s phones. C, and the languages that copied it, remain the standard tools for building operating systems and high-performance software. Ritchie shared the Turing Award with Thompson in 1983 for this work.
Frequently asked
What did Dennis Ritchie create?
He created the C programming language in the early 1970s and, with Ken Thompson, co-created the Unix operating system. Between them, C and Unix shaped almost all the software and operating systems that followed.
Why is the C language so important?
C is powerful, efficient and close to the hardware, yet portable across machines. Most operating systems, including the ancestors of Windows, macOS, Linux and Android, are written in C or its descendants, and most later languages borrow its syntax.
What is Dennis Ritchie's connection to Unix?
He co-created Unix at Bell Labs with Ken Thompson and then rewrote it in C, which made it portable to different computers. That portability is a large part of why Unix and its descendants spread across the whole industry.