/usr/dmr

Ritchie is best known as the creator of the C programming language and key developer of the Unix operating system, he worked together with Ken Thompson, who is credited with writing the original version of Unix. One of Ritchie's most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.

During the 1960s, Ritchie and Ken Thompson worked on the Multics operating system at Bell Labs. However, Bell Labs pulled out of the project in 1969. Thompson then found an old PDP-7 machine and developed his own application programs and operating system from scratch, aided by Ritchie and others. In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix", a pun on the name "Multics". To supplement assembly language with a system-level programming language, Thompson created B. Later, B was replaced by C, created by Ritchie, who continued to contribute to the development of Unix and C for many years.

Ritchie liked to emphasize that he was just one member of a group. He suggested that many of the improvements he introduced simply

"looked like a good thing to do,"

and that anyone else in the same place at the same time might have done the same thing. But Bjarne Stroustrup who designed C++ said

"If Dennis had decided to spend that decade on esoteric math, Unix would have been stillborn."

Nowadays, the C language is widely used today in application, operating system, and embedded system development, and its influence is seen in most modern programming languages. Unix has also been influential, establishing computing concepts and principles that have been widely adopted.