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Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of Unix and C, has died

Written by Historian

Thursday, 13 October 2011 07:39

Dennis Ritchie the designer and original developer of both the C programming language, and co-creator of Unix has died at age 71 after a prolonged illness. It seems incredible from today's perspective that two people, motivated mainly by enthusiasm, should develop both an operating system and a programming language but that's exactly what Dennis Ritchie and Kenneth Thompson achieved. They met and started working together at Bell Laboratories around 1968. At the time the Bell Labs (now Alcatel-Lucent) were famous as the home of the transistor and many other basic research projects. Ritchie and Thompson were given the brief to "investigate interesting problems in computer science".

[LINK: I Programmer ]

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