C (programming language)

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie ( 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. He was the 'R' in K&R C and commonly known by his username dmr.

Dennis M. Ritchie

1941 -- Born in Bronxville, N.Y.

1963 -- Graduates from Harvard University with a B.S. in Physics

1968 -- Receives from Harvard University a Ph.D. in mathematics

1967 -- Joins Bell Labs, following his father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there

1968 -- Joins the Bell Labs team working on Multics, a joint effort of Bell Labs, MIT and GE to develop a general computer operating system

1972 -- Creates C language

1989 -- Receives with Ken Thompson the NEC C&C Prize for significant contributions to computer technology

1983 -- Named Bell Labs Fellow

1988 -- Elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering

1990 -- Appointed head, System Software Research Department in the Computer Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, Murray Hill, N.J.

1995 -- Heads the effort to create the Plan 9 operating system

1996 -- Heads the effort to create the Inferno(TM) operating system

1998 -- Awarded with Kenneth Thompson the U.S. National Medal of Technology for the development of the UNIX system