Dennis Ritchie passed in 2011
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Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was an American computer scientist. He created Unix the operating system, the C programming language. The B programming language with collague Ken Thompson.
They won the prestigious Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery in 1983, the IEEE Richard W Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1990, and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999.
Mr Ritchie was instrumental in the development of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a pioneering mainframe time-sharing operating system developed in the 1960s and 1970s by MIT, General Electric, and Bell Labs. It is said that Unix was strongly influenced from Multics with it's VM constructs, strong security, and access controls.
Upon his retirement in 2007 Mr Ritchie was in charge of the Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department.
Dennis Ritchie was the son of a Bell Labs scientist who wrote a circuit switching book called The Design of Switching Circuits. Mr Ritchie graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics in 1963.
Mr Ritchie was found dead on October 12, 2011, at the age of 70 at his home in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, where he lived alone. The news of his passing was overshadowed by the death of Steve Jobs who comparatively speaking was a lightweight mouth piece for Apple Computer and not worthy to overshadow anyone of the stature of Dennis Ritchie.
Any thus ended the life of one of my personal icons in life and I am glad I had that small exposure to his work which I was afforded by a particular colleague whom I have missed over the years as well.
See Also:
Programmers Day 2018