We’re getting reports today that Dennis Ritchie, the person who created the C programming language and spearheaded the construction of Unix , has died on the age of 70. The unhappy news was first reported by Rob Pike, a Google engineer and previous colleague of Ritchie’s, who confirmed via Google+ that the pc scientist gave up the ghost over the weekend, after a protracted battle with an unspecified illness. Ritchie’s illustrious career began in 1967, when he joined Bell Labs only one year before receiving a PhD in physics from Harvard University. It didn’t take long, however, for the Bronxville, NY native to have a prime impact upon computer science. In 1969, he helped develop the Unix operating system alongside Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and other Bell colleagues. At round the same time, he began laying the groundwork for what would become the C programming language — a framework he and co-author Thompson would later explain of their seminal 1978 book, The C Programming Language. Ritchie went directly to earn several awards at the strength of those accomplishments, including the Turing Award in 1983, election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1988, and the National Medal of Technology in 1999. The perfect circumstances surrounding his death are unclear for the time being, though news of his passing has already elicited an outpouring of tributes and remembrance for the person known to many as dmr (his e-mail address at Bell Labs). “He was a quiet and mostly private man,” Pike wrote his brief post, “but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the sector has lost a very great mind.”
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