Dennis Ritchie

Ken Thompson (sitting) and Dennis Ritchie (standing

Dennis Ritchie (often referred to as dmr) was an influential American computer scientist, best known for his work on UNIX and the C programming language - both produced in collaboration with Ken Thompson.

He attended Harvard, where he received an undergraduate degree in 1963, and more or less completed a doctoral degree in 1968. He went to work at Bell Labs in 1967, joining the Computing Sciences Research Center; he spent the rest of his career at the Labs, and its descendants. In 1968, he was part of the Bell team which joined the Multics project; after Bell pulled out of Multics, he and Thompson eventually fell into UNIX and C.

Further reading

• Brian Kernighan, UNIX: A History and a Memoir - has a brief bio of Ritchie at the end of Chapter 3

External links

• Dennis Ritchie's Home Page
  • The Unix Time-sharing System (PDF) - 1978 BSTJ verson
  • The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System (PDF)
  • The UNIX Time-sharing System - A Retrospective (PDF)
  • The Development of the C Language (PDF)
  • Five Little Languages and How They Grew
  • Odd Comments and Strange Doings in Unix
  • Papers about Unix Portability
  • An amusing photo - "Ken and [DMR] in front of a PDP-11"
• Ken and DMR - from another angle
• Dennis Ritchie Thesis - in addition to a lot of content about the thesis, it also contains much fascinating material about Dennis from the family archives
• Discovering Dennis Ritchie's Lost Dissertation
• How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery