Legends of the Commodore 64 & Amiga scene

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c. October 12, 2011)

deceased on the  age of  70 .

born:  September 9, 1941

died:  October 12, 2011 (aged 70)

Dennis Ritchie:

Was an American computer scientist.He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system. 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 from President Bill Clinton in 1999. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007.

Notable awards	Turing Award (1983) National Medal of Technology(1998) IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal(1990) Computer Pioneer Award (1994) Computer History Museum Fellow(1997)[1] Harold Pender Award (2003) Japan Prize (2011)

The Legacy of Dennis:

Following Ritchie’s death, computer historian Paul E. Ceruzzi stated:

Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but… if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you’d see his work everywhere inside.

In an interview shortly after Ritchie’s death, long time colleague Brian Kernighan said Ritchie never expected C to be so significant. Kernighan told the New York Times “The tools that Dennis built — and their direct descendants — run pretty much everything today.”[24] Kernighan reminded readers of how important a role C and UNIX had played in the development of later high-profile projects, such as the iPhone. Other testimonials to his influence followed.

At his death, one commentator, compared the relative importance of Steve Jobs and Ritchie, concluding, “[Ritchie’s] work played a key role in spawning the technological revolution of the last forty years — including technology on which Apple went on to build its fortune.” Another commentator said, “Ritchie, on the other hand, invented and co-invented two key software technologies which make up the DNA of effectively every single computer software product we use directly or even indirectly in the modern age. It sounds like a wild claim, but it really is true.”Another said, “many in computer science and related fields knew of Ritchie’s importance to the growth and development of, well, everything to do with computing,…”

The Fedora 16 Linux distribution, which was released about a month after he died, was dedicated to his memory. FreeBSD 9.0, released January 12, 2012 was also dedicated in his memory.

Various pictures of Dennis through his life :

 

sources : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie

Rest in peace… Dennis