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Vendredi, 30 Décembre 2011 01:00

11 Who Died in 2011 (And Were Not Named Steve)

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Dennis Ritchie

Dennis Ritchie is one of those little-hailed computer science pioneers whose work has ended up influencing everyone in technology. If your computer isn't running some component of Unix, the operating system he helped build, it's probably using software written in C, the language he created.

"It’s really hard to overstate how much of the modern information economy is built on the work Dennis did," said Rob Pike, a Google distinguished engineer who once worked across the hall from Ritchie at Bell Labs.

Gentle and far-from-flashy, Ritchie was in some ways the opposite of Jobs. He watched Unix and C take off because of their technical superiority, and he never cashed in on the success of his incredibly popular software. He stayed at Bell Labs for 40 years because he liked working with scientists and being able to stumble into canisters of liquid helium while at work.

Photo: Dennis Ritchie (standing) and Ken Thompson at a PDP-11 in 1972. Courtesy of Bell Labs

11 Who Died in 2011 (And Were Not Named Steve)Robert McMillan is a writer with Wired Enterprise. Got a tip? Send him an email at: robert_mcmillan [at]
Follow @bobmcmillan on Twitter.


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