Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941, in Bronx-ville, New York. He was born to Alistair Ritchie, a switching systems engineer for Bell Laboratories, and Jean McGee Ritchie, a homemaker. Ritchie grew up in New Jersey, and after a childhood in which he did very well academically, he went on to attend Harvard University. There he studied science and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physics. While he was still going to school, Ritchie happened to go to a lecture about how Harvard’s computer system, a Univac I, worked. He was fascinated by what he heard and wanted to find out more. Outside of his Harvard studies, Ritchie began to explore computers more thoroughly and was especially interested in how they were programmed.
The C programming language and its descendants continue to be used to write the software that makes digital devices and networks work, while UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems run on a vast range of computing systems.
Ritchie’s early work laid the foundations for much of the technical infrastructure of our modern digital world. He enjoyed traveling and reading, but his main passion was his work, and he stayed with Bell Labs until his retirement in 2007. With Ken Thompson, he was awarded the ACM Turing Award (1983), the US National Medal of Technology (1999), and the Japan Prize (2011). He passed away in 2011.
