Dennis Ritchie

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is one of the pioneers of modern computing. Working with Ken Thompson and others, he developed the first versions of the Unix operating system and wrote the first Unix Programmer's Manual (1971). With Thompson and Brian Kernighan he worked on the C programming language and he and Kernighan wrote the seminal book: The C Programming Language.

Born in Bronxville, New York. He graduated from Harvard with a degree in physics and an advanced degree in applied mathematics. In 1967 he went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories at their Computing Sciences Research Center and he still does. He worked on Multics, BCPL and ALTRAN[?] before becoming involved in the B programming language and Unix. He is head of the System Software Research department at Lucent Technologies.

External links

• Dennis Ritchie's home page (http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/)
• Interview published February 7. 2003 (http://unix.se/article/articleview/950/1/24)