Doug Kerr
Well-known member
It has been reported that computer pioneer Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, of late with Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Laboratories, has died at the age of 70. The cause of his death has not at this writing been disclosed.
Ritchie is considered the originator of the C programming language and was an important contributor to the development of the Unix operating system (often said to be its "co-developer") (and of its predecessor, Multics).
Ritchie joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated in 1967 (not too long before i left there, late 1968).
I did not know him personally nor work with him that I remember, but I heard that he was one of the stars of a group of young people who had come to BTL to work in the emerging field of computer science.
My few interactions with that group (possibly with Ritchie himself) were in the area of the application of ASCII and the interpretation of the standards document itself (of which I had been the principal editor). The group was very keen, with respect to the Multics user interface, on using the various control characters of ASCII in a way consistent with their formal definitions, quite a departure from the "rough-and-ready" application of ASCII by such pioneers as Gary Kildall (not that I wasn't grateful for that, too!).
At the time, the quick demise of ASCII was predicted by some. (Dating from the first standardization of the full code, with both cases of the alphabetic characters, the standard is now 44 years old!)
These wonderful quotes attributed to Ritchie are from the Wikipedia article on him:
• "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party."
• "Usenet is a strange place."
• "UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
• "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
They are very telling of his genius, along with the wonderful sense of humor and whimsey that wafted through BTL in those times. (It was as that withered in an increasingly political environment that I chose to leave.)
Ritchie was the son of Alistair E. Ritchie of Bell Telephone Laboratories, the author of the seminal book on relay circuit design, The Design of Switching Circuits (1951) (jointly with William Keister and Seth H. Washburn).
It is one of my favorite texts (I consider it "precious"), one of the few I retained during a great winnowing out of my book collection when we moved from Dallas to Weatherford. In fact I have two copies, my own (associated with which is a great story I will tell some other time) and the personal copy of my long-time friend, Gunther Willibald, who died last year at age 83. (When newly at BTL, he studied relay circuit design under Bill Keister, using that book as a text.) Its arrival here foreshadowed Gunther's approaching death.
Best regards,
Doug
Ritchie is considered the originator of the C programming language and was an important contributor to the development of the Unix operating system (often said to be its "co-developer") (and of its predecessor, Multics).
Ritchie joined Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated in 1967 (not too long before i left there, late 1968).
I did not know him personally nor work with him that I remember, but I heard that he was one of the stars of a group of young people who had come to BTL to work in the emerging field of computer science.
My few interactions with that group (possibly with Ritchie himself) were in the area of the application of ASCII and the interpretation of the standards document itself (of which I had been the principal editor). The group was very keen, with respect to the Multics user interface, on using the various control characters of ASCII in a way consistent with their formal definitions, quite a departure from the "rough-and-ready" application of ASCII by such pioneers as Gary Kildall (not that I wasn't grateful for that, too!).
At the time, the quick demise of ASCII was predicted by some. (Dating from the first standardization of the full code, with both cases of the alphabetic characters, the standard is now 44 years old!)
These wonderful quotes attributed to Ritchie are from the Wikipedia article on him:
• "I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party."
• "Usenet is a strange place."
• "UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its simplicity."
• "C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
They are very telling of his genius, along with the wonderful sense of humor and whimsey that wafted through BTL in those times. (It was as that withered in an increasingly political environment that I chose to leave.)
Ritchie was the son of Alistair E. Ritchie of Bell Telephone Laboratories, the author of the seminal book on relay circuit design, The Design of Switching Circuits (1951) (jointly with William Keister and Seth H. Washburn).
It is one of my favorite texts (I consider it "precious"), one of the few I retained during a great winnowing out of my book collection when we moved from Dallas to Weatherford. In fact I have two copies, my own (associated with which is a great story I will tell some other time) and the personal copy of my long-time friend, Gunther Willibald, who died last year at age 83. (When newly at BTL, he studied relay circuit design under Bill Keister, using that book as a text.) Its arrival here foreshadowed Gunther's approaching death.
Best regards,
Doug
