Dennis Ritchie
The man who made computers as you know them
Some key points about Dennis Ritchie, his life and work:
- 1941 - Born in Bronxville, New York
- 1963 - graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics
- 1967 - began working at the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center
- 1969 - co-created the Unix operating system along with Ken Thompson
- 1972 - led the team that created the C programming Language
- 1982 - received the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award
- 1983 - co-wrote the famous "K&R" book, The C Programming Language, with Brian Kernighan
- 1983 - co-received the Turing Award, the highest award in all of computer science
- 1990 - received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
- 1999 - received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation
- 2011 - received the Japan Prize
- 2011 - Dennis Ritchie dies of natural causes
- various - The C programming language goes on to serves as a model for creating the languages Javascript, Python, and PHP.
- 1991 - The UNIX operating system is used as a model by Linus Torvalds to create the first version of Linux.
"The only way to learn a new programming language is by writing programs in it"
-- words of Dennis Ritchie