Dennis Ritchie

• Sep 9, 1941 - Born in Bronxville, New York.
• May 1963 - Earned bachelor’s degree in physics at Harvard.
• Feb 1, 1967 - Started working at Bell Labs.
• 1967 - Joined Bell Laboratories where he worked on Multics operating system. When that OS got abandoned, he met Ken Thompson and they worked on creating UNIX.
• May 1, 1968 - Earned his doctoral degree in mathematics at Harvard.
• Nov 3, 1971 - UNIX was created and sent out to the public. It was created at MIT through Bell Labs. It became successful because of how simple and cheap the system was.
• 1973 - Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson created the C programming language for UNIX, which is the most commonly used language used for computer applications. This helped UNIX thrive because the C made computer controls very easy and flexible.
• 1974 - Achieved ACM Award for most outstanding paper for system and languages and later on got the IEEE Emanueal Piore award in 1982.
• 1983 - Dennis Ritchie alongside Ken Thompson, earned the AM Turing Award.
• 1994 - Earned the Computer Pioneer Award.
• Oct 12, 2011 - Passed away after fighting a long battle with prostate cancer. He is still being honored to this day.

"UNIX is basically a simple operating system, but you have to be a genius to understand the simplicity."

Learn more about Dennis Ritchie on Wikipedia and his homepage.

Image: Wikimedia Commons