Dennis Ritchie, Co-Founder Of Unix, Inventor Of C Dead At 70

Dennis Ritchie, co-creator of Unix and the creator of the C Programming Language died on October 8, he was just 70-years-old.

When building the C programming language Ritchie called his accomplishment “quirky, flawed and an enormous success” and he couldn’t have been more correct, his advanced programming language became the building blocks for nearly every programming language and scripting tool on the open market.

As Wired points out those “building blocks” were used in Java, JavaScript, Objective C and Cocoa, Python, Perl, and PHP.

Originally created to port Unix to any computer the C Programming language quickly made it clear that Ritchie was more interested in research then building the world’s next Microsoft after he used funds to create the next great word processor to instead study the language of computer programming.

Jeong Kim, president of Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs said in a statement:

“Dennis was well loved by his colleagues at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, and will be greatly missed. He was truly an inspiration to all of us, not just for his many accomplishments, but because of who he was as a friend, an inventor, and a humble and gracious man. We would like to express our deepest sympathies to the Ritchie family, and to all who have been touched in some way by Dennis.”

Dennis Ritchie is largely responsible for the way we use technology today, he was a true pioneer and will be missed by the entire computing industry. Our condolences go out to Ritchie’s family and friends.

Do you remember the first time you encountered C or Unix? Share your stories in our comments section.