Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941; found dead October 12, 2011)was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era."He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.
C (like the letter C) is a general-purpose programming language initially developed by Dennis Ritchie between 1969 and 1973 at AT&T Bell Labs. Its design provides constructs that map efficiently to typical machine instructions, and therefore it found lasting use in applications that had formerly been coded in assembly language, most notably system software like the Unix computer operating system.
