Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. 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. He was the "R" in K&R C, and commonly...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth9 September 1941
CityBronxville, NY
CountryUnited States of America
C is peculiar in a lot of ways, but it, like many other successful things, has a certain unity of approach that stems from development in a small group
Twenty percent of all input forms filled out by people contain bad data.
C was already implemented on several quite different machines and OSs, Unix was already being distributed on the PDP-11, but the portability of the whole system was new
Oh, I've seen copies [of Linux Journal] around the terminal room at The Labs.
At the same time, much of it seems to have to do with recreating things we or others had already done; it seems rather derivative intellectually; is there a dearth of really new ideas?
Over the past several years, I've been more in a managerial role.