II · Languages & runtimes

Dennis Ritchie

1941–2011

Bell Labs · co-creator of C and Unix

Gave us

C, the language. Unix, with Ken Thompson. The K&R book.

The story

Quiet, modest, monumental. Died a week after Steve Jobs in 2011 — got a fraction of the obituary coverage despite C and Unix being load-bearing for everything Jobs ever shipped.

More from Languages & runtimes

Ken Thompson Bell Labs · Google · co-creator of Unix · co-creator of Go Bjarne Stroustrup Morgan Stanley · ex-Bell Labs · creator of C++ Guido van Rossum Microsoft · ex-Dropbox · ex-Google · creator of Python Anders Hejlsberg Microsoft technical fellow · creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, TypeScript Graydon Hoare Independent · ex-Mozilla · creator of Rust

Across the field

III Tim Berners-Lee CERN · W3C · Inrupt · creator of the World Wide Web III Vint Cerf Google chief internet evangelist · co-creator of TCP/IP III Paul Mockapetris Inventor of DNS · USC ISI III Brendan Eich Brave Software · ex-Mozilla · creator of JavaScript III Daniel Stenberg wolfSSL · creator and maintainer of curl III David Karger MIT professor · co-founder Akamai IV Michael Stonebraker MIT · creator of Ingres, Postgres, Vertica, VoltDB · 2014 Turing laureate IV Jim Gray Microsoft Research · ex-Tandem · 1998 Turing laureate

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