Dennis Ritchie

Creator of C and co-creator of Unix — the plumbing under essentially every modern operating system.

Specifications & Metrics

era

1941 – 2011

Core Principles & Analysis

• C began in 1972 as the language to port Unix beyond the PDP-11.
• The Kernighan & Ritchie book taught a generation to program.
• He and Ken Thompson shared the 1983 Turing Award for Unix.