The Birth and history of C Programming Language

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (b. September 9, 1941; found dead October 12, 2011), was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson. Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology fromPresident Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. He was the 'R' in K&R C and commonly known by his username dmr.

According to some, the Internet's birth was the birth of the C programming language, and the UNIX operating system.

Dennis Ritchie, and Ken Thompson worked together on the C programming language on some discarded DEC PDP-7 computers. Ken and Dennis are rumoured to have lots of fun in those days, and in creating and using this variant language loosely based on BCPL, developed by Martin Richards, and B, developed by Ken Thompson, Ken and Dennis not only developed C, but also helped develop the UNIX operating system, developed by Ken Thompson in 1970 using B.

As Ken and Dennis, working in California at Bell Labratories in Berkley, perfected their creation, the United States Department of Defence (the ARPA and later DARPA project) began to take notice of their work, and eventually became the clients of Bell Labratories in the early 1970s.

Ken's UNIX operating system was a perfect match to furthur the ARPA projects goal, and though Ken and Dennis had some great technology at their fingertips, it is also rumoured that Dennis, in his late twenties at the time, had much earlier created a "back-door" in the operating system so that he could get into any UNIX machine that he wanted to. This was by far probably the least malicious "back-door" to ever appear on any computer system, but, when the United Stated Department of Defence found out about this, the heads rolled and Dennis was out of a job to save face. He was quickly hired back, however, and (in 2004) is having an extremely successful career, and is the author of one of the most revered books in the history of programming languages: "the C Programming Language" by Brian Kernighan, and Dennis Ritchie published by Prentice Hall in 1978.

Even today UNIX, and C seem to never die out with at least millions of C programs written over the years, and C hugely anchored in all variants of UNIX that I know of, and certainly all variants of the popular Linux operating system (more on that later).

Thanks Ken, Brian, and Dennis for all your hard work over the years!