Thread: RIP Dennis Ritchie

Even good 'ole Steve Jobs owed his later livelihood to this man.

By creating C, Ritchie gave birth to the concept of open systems. C was developed so they could port Unix to any computer, and so that programs written on one platform (and the skills used to develop them) could be easily transferred to another.

In that way, Ritchie has shaped our world in much more fundamental ways than Steve Jobs or Bill Gates have. What sets him apart from them is that he did it all not in a quest for wealth or fame, but just out of intellectual curiosity. Unix and C were the product of pure research—research that started as a side-project using equipment bought based on a promise that Ritchie and Thompson would develop a word processor.

Imagine what the world would be like if they had just stuck to that promise. What would your life be like without C or Unix? When was the first time your life was touched by dmr’s work?

Dennis Ritchie, Father of C and Co-Developer of Unix, Dies | Wired Enterprise | Wired.com
Dennis Ritchie, C Programmer And Unix Co-Creator, Has Died : The Two-Way : NPR

R.i.p. ritchie, i took my C exam today in your honor. May your legacy live on.

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This man was the co-inventor of the modern operating system, and the inventor of the most popular high level imperative programming languages in the world. It is not an exaggeration to say that he was one of the most important people in computing in the 20th century.

-H