Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (September 9, 1941 – c.
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, 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 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.
