His death was announced on 12 October 2011. Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, born in Bronxville, New York, on 9 September 1941, had been found dead at his home in New Jersey; he was 70.
Within days, much of the coverage had been absorbed by the death of Steve Jobs a week earlier — a juxtaposition that has since become a standard way of describing how differently the industry rewards its marketers and its engineers.
Ritchie's work is the substrate of nearly everything the industry builds on. He joined Bell Labs in 1967 after studying at Harvard, and in 1969 he and Ken Thompson wrote the first version of Unix for a discarded PDP-7 minicomputer. The step that made it endure came in 1972–73: Unix was rewritten in C, a language Ritchie had derived from Thompson's B. Writing an operating system in a high-level language made the code portable to new hardware, and turned C into a common tongue for systems programming.
C and Unix then escaped the laboratory. Unix's ideas flowed into Linux, macOS, the BSDs and the design of the internet's servers; C became the language in which other languages' runtimes, embedded firmware and large parts of modern operating systems are written. Ritchie and Thompson shared the ACM Turing Award in 1983 and the US National Medal of Technology in 1998, and Ritchie later led the team at Bell Labs that carried Unix's ideas further in Plan 9 and Inferno.
The anniversary coverage from Heise, titled "Fifteen years ago: the death of Dennis Ritchie and the mystery of his dissertation", returns to a less familiar chapter: his Harvard doctorate. His doctoral work, in applied mathematics, is one of the more obscure corners of an otherwise thoroughly documented biography, and the piece frames it as a puzzle rather than a settled record. The full article was not accessible to this report.
What is not in doubt is the shape of the legacy. Ritchie rarely gave interviews, published little beyond the books that became standards — among them "The C Programming Language", written with Brian Kernighan in 1978 and still known simply as K&R — and consistently credited Thompson and their colleagues. Fifteen years after his death, the language he designed in a few weeks of work at Bell Labs still ranks near the top of the most-used programming languages, and the operating system he co-wrote is, by descendant count, the most widely running software family in existence.
