Last week, we heard the passing of Steve Jobs. This week, another technology icon, a lesser known one, is now gone. Dennis Ritchie, the founder the Unix operating system, as well as the founder of the C programming language has died.
Ritchie along with Ken Thompson created the Unix operating system during their tenure at Bell Labs. Shortly after, Ritchie started working on the C programming language. His contributions to Unix and C were monumental.
I still have old C books written by Dennis and Brian Kernighan stashed in a box somewhere.
For nostalgia purposes, I should re-read those books again.
Dennis Ritchie didn’t receive the fanfare or the credit that Steve Jobs have had, but Ritchie’s impact to the tech industry will be long lasting. After all, Microsoft Windows and PHP, two technologies impacted by Ritchie’s creation, are written in C.