[clue] RIP Dennis Ritchie (TALK)

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

Mike, et. al.

I received notice of Dennis' passing last night, and blogged about it
today.

For those of you interested, here is a link to my blog:

http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Online/Blogs/Paw-Prints-Writings-of-the-maddog/RIP-Dennis

md

On Thu, 2011-10-13 at 10:24 -0600, Mike Bean wrote:
> Hopefully the group can forgive me for posting about a non-technical
> subject, but after all the ruckus regarding Steve Job's death, I feel some
> obligation to point out someone who I'm inclined to think, DESERVES to be
> recognized
> 
> *http://tinyurl.com/6yk7y4g
> 
> *Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70
> [image: dennis_ritchie6]
> 
> After a long illness, Dennis
> Ritchie<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie>,
> father of Unix and an esteemed computer scientist, died last weekend at the
> age of 70.
> 
> Ritchie, also known as “dmr”, is best know for creating the C programming
> language as well as being instrumental in the development of UNIX along with
> Ken Thompson. Ritchie spent most of his career at Bell Labs, which at the
> time of his joining in 1967, was one of the largest phone providers in the
> U.S. and had one of the most well-known research labs in operation.
> 
> Working alongside Thompson (who had written B) at Bell in the late sixties,
> the two men set out to develop a more efficient operating system for the
> up-and-coming minicomputer, resulting in the release of Unix (running on a
> DEC PDP-1) in 1971.
> 
> Though Unix was cheap and compatible with just about any machine, allowing
> users to install a variety of software systems, the OS was written in
> machine (or assembly) language, meaning that it had a small vocabulary and
> suffered in relation to memory.
> 
> By 1973, Ritchie and Thompson had rewritten Unix in C, developing its
> syntax, functionality, and beyond to give the language the ability to
> program an operating system. The kernel was published in the same year.
> 
> Today, C remains the second most popular programming language in the world
> (or at least the language in which the second most lines of code have been
> written), and ushered in C++ and Java; while the pair’s work on Unix led to,
> among other things, Linus Torvalds’ Linux. The work has without a doubt made
> Ritchie one of the most important, if not under-recognized, engineers of the
> modern era.
> 
> His work, specifically in relation to UNIX, led to him becoming a joint
> recipient of the Turing Award with Ken Thompson in 1983, as well as a
> recipient of the National Medal of Technology in 1998 from then-president
> Bill Clinton.
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-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.673.7875       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
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