Most Active Stories Thu October 13, 2011 Dennis Ritchie, C
Programmer And Unix Co-Creator, Has Died Dennis Ritchie is being
remembered today as a pioneering computer scientist, the "father
of [the] C programming language," co-creator of the Unix
operating system and "a 'titan' of the [computer] industry whose
influence was largely unknown." Ritchie, 70, has died. The news
was confirmed this morning by Alcatel-Lucent, which owns the
Bell Labs where Ritchie worked from 1967 until his retirement in
2007. "While the introduction of Intel's 4004 microprocessor in
1971 is widely regarded as a key moment in modern computing, the
contemporaneous birth of the C programming language is less well
known. Yet the creation of C has as much claim, if not more, to
be the true seminal moment of IT as we know it; it sits at the
heart of programming — and in the hearts of programmers — as the
quintessential expression of coding elegance, power, simplicity
and portability." It adds that "Ritchie designed a computer
language, C,