C and Unix pioneer Dennis Ritchie dies

[ThePythonicCow]

The first announcement of Dennis Ritchie's passing, from a post online by Rob Pike:https://plus.google.com/u/0/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP?hl=en:
Rob Pike - Oct 12, 2011 - Public
I just heard that, after a long illness, Dennis Ritchie (dmr) died at home this weekend. I have no more information.

I trust there are people here who will appreciate the reach of his contributions and mourn his passing appropriately.

He was a quiet and mostly private man, but he was also my friend, colleague, and collaborator, and the world has lost a truly great mind.

[learninglight]

Dennis Ritchie Died last weekend, a death far more important than Steve Jobs', in fact Jobs' products are mostly built upon his inventions. Worst thing is that this won't even hit the mainstream media or if it does it wont make the big news like Jobs

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-15287391

[Robstar]

I don't get how you think one death could be more important than another, as you mention.
Both people involved where very good at what they did. One pushed one way and another the other way.
The important thing is that they pushed computer science in a major way.
The systems we use now are here because of people like them. Unix is great and apple recognized this, that is why they based their newer operating systems with Unix roots.
Again the masses do not know this but we do.
I for one thank you Mr. Dennis Ritchie for all your contributions in the computer field.
May you rest in peace.

[Healthy Skeptic]

What people don't understand is that the Internet owes it's life to UNIX.
The World Wide Web was created, and is still sustained, on UNIX Platforms.
Virtually all Servers on the WWW run UNIX.
Haven't people noticed that when they type in URLS (Addresses) that they use a forward-slash "/"?
This is because it is UNIX convention. When the Internet became popular, a lot of people complained about this because they were used to using the backward-slash "\" when using DOS. Well, DOS was a 'rip-off' of UNIX adapted to run on the PC.
Virtually all DOS commands are the same as UNIX commands.
Now we have Linux, which truly is a PC version of UNIX.

[ThePythonicCow]

I took the unusual step of forcing my post of Dennis M. Ritchie's death to appear before what had been the original posting of this event, by another member.

Let's show some respect for Dennis on this thread (and leave any negative thoughts of Jobs, DOS or backslashes for elsewhere ;).) Thanks.

I did not know Dennis personally, but I did know him through his most famous book, "The C Programming Language", which he wrote with Brian Kernighan, and which is the way that so many of us learned the C programming language. I still have my original copy of that book - it looks like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/K%26R_C.jpg
Rest in peace, Dennis. Ya' done good.

[Healthy Skeptic]

I did not know Dennis personally, but I did know him through his most famous book, "The C Programming Language", which he wrote with Brian Kernighan, and which is the way that so many of us learned the C programming language. I still have my original copy of that book - it looks like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/K%26R_C.jpg
Rest in peace, Dennis. Ya' done good.

I also learnt C from this book!
I hope I didn't come over as negative to him!! Absolutely the converse!.
I was pointing out that if it wasn't for him and his UNIX Operating System, then we wouldn't be conversing on this Forum.... ie... It would not Exist!!
People don't understand the structure of the Internet. Without UNIX it would not exist!!

[ThePythonicCow]

I changed the title of this thread from "Unix creator" to "C and Unix pioneer".

Dennis was not the only key person at the birth of Unix. Ken Thompson drove the initial design of Unix, beginning in 1969, writing in PDP-7 assembly code. Ken rewrote his kernel in a language called B, and then when the Labs got a new PDP-11, Dennis drove the development of the C programming language, based partly on B, that was soon adopted by Unix.

Both worked with the help and key contributions of others in Bell Labs, New Jersey, including Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna. Unix and C form the basis of many variants, including Berkeley Unix (BSD, for Berkeley Software Distribution), Linux and (via BSD) MacOS.

From http://www.livinginternet.com/i/iw_unix_c.htm :

C Programming Language History
Dennis Ritchie, Developer / Inventor of C Programing Language, Unix

http://www.livinginternet.com/g/ritchie.jpeg


Dennis Ritchie

The development of Unix in the C language made it uniquely portable and improvable.

The first version of Unix was written in the low-level PDP-7 assembler language. Soon after, a language called TMG was created for the PDP-7 by R. M. McClure. Using TMG to develop a FORTRAN compiler, Ken Thompson instead ended up developing a compiler for a new high-level language he called B, based on the earlier BCPL language developed by Martin Richard. Where it might take several pages of detailed PDP-7 assembly code to accomplish a given task, the same functionality could typically be expressed in a higher level language like B in just a few lines. B was thereafter used for further development of the Unix system, which made the work much faster and more convenient.

When the PDP-11 computer arrived at Bell Labs, Dennis Ritchie built on B to create a new language called C which inherited Thompson's taste for concise syntax, and had a powerful mix of high-level functionality and the detailed features required to program an operating system. Most of the components of Unix were eventually rewritten in C, culminating with the kernel itself in 1973. Because of its convenience and power, C went on to become the most popular programming language in the world over the next quarter century.


There's another good presentation of the early history of Unix and C, and Linux as well, at http://digital-domain.net/lug/unix-linux-history.html

[Calz]

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/K%26R_C.jpg
Rest in peace, Dennis. Ya' done good.

10519 :yo:

[Healthy Skeptic]

Thanks Paul,
I understand how the OP feels that Steve Jobs was given 'heaps of publicity' but 'grass roots' people who built the 'guts' of the computers we know now were not.
Yes, I take 'Humble Points' about what I have said, and I agree with the extra material you have provided. When I was a 'Mr Spock' IT person I also dealt with not only BSD UNIX but with, AT&T UNIX, B-Shell, K-Shell, KB-Shell, A-Shell, and KTB-Shell versions of UNIX. I am so glad that I gave up IT 15 Years ago. I could not stand the 80-100 hour per weeks being on call 24/7. Sorry, going off topic.
With Love, HS

[Terra]

Sad news. R.I.P Dennis Ritchie and thank you for all you have given us.

PDP-11's :eek:, the fun times we had with them...

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/kd14.jpg

Thank you for sharing this news, his work was the foundation of so much of what we have today.

[ThePythonicCow]

10519 :yo:
Good grief - a screen full of UI widgets to say Hello, World ;).

What ever happened to the good old

echo 'main(){puts("Hello, World");}' > hello.c; make hello; ./hello

¤=[Post Update]=¤


Sad news. R.I.P Dennis Ritchie and thank you for all you have given us.

PDP-11's :eek:, the fun times we had with them...

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/kd14.jpg

Thank you for sharing this news, his work was the foundation of so much of what we have today.

For those who don't recognize them, that's Ken sitting at the console, and Dennis standing, watching.

[Healthy Skeptic]

http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/kd14.jpg

Oh Sheeeet! I used to work on these and program these!!
BANG goes my credibility!
Do other 'oldies' remember other Computers I used to work on like:
IBM 360 & 370, Burroughs, Honeywell, Control Data and Prime?
Using 'languages' like Assembler (360 & 370), Fortran, COBOL and RPG?
When I was young........................(SHUT UP!!!).

[Calz]

Do other 'oldies' remember other Computers I used to work on like:
IBM 360 & 370, Using 'languages' like Assembler (360 & 370), Fortran, COBOL and RPG?

When I was young........................(SHUT UP!!!).

Most of my (computer) career has been in operations.

Tried programming but caught on quick to your mentioned 80-100 24/7 and decided to relax on the night shift and have fun with plenty of reading, gaming, surfing and now avalon (oh yeah ... in between work!) :haha:

First job was in a Unix shop and one of the coding jobs was low level shell scripting stuff. Programming was great fun in college (even 360 Assembler :) ) ... not so much (for me) after that.

Kudos to those who can handle it.

[panopticon]

I did not know Dennis personally, but I did know him through his most famous book, "The C Programming Language", which he wrote with Brian Kernighan, and which is the way that so many of us learned the C programming language. I still have my original copy of that book - it looks like this:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/K%26R_C.jpg


Like many here I learnt C from this book.
Mine is a lot more "dog eared" than this copy though...
I would even call mine "coffee ++"!

Unix and its children BSD, Linux (any modern operating system for that matter) all own a debt to Ritchie, as do those who use any technology with embedded code... mobile phones, iPads, Cars, GPS.... In other words everything we call technology today owes some level of debt to Ritchie and the many (often anonymous or forgotten) pioneers of computer technology.

May he travel well in his journey.

Kind Regards, :yo:
Panopticon

[Calz]

Of course ... us "oldies" might remember submitting a deck of these guys ...

10522

[Anchor]

If it were not for what this man contributed to computer science, I would not be what I am today.

I programmed in C for 15 years. When C++ came along I didn't jump for 5 years I loved C so much.

I too am moved at his passing.

printf("Dennis says... Goodbye world\n");

[Healthy Skeptic]

Of course ... us "oldies" might remember submitting a deck of these guys ...

10522

And I remember when one day the 'ribbon broke' on the card punch!!
I had to 'read' the 12 and 11 punches to read what I had punched on the cards!!
Does anyone remember what a 12-4 punch means?

[Anchor]

I dropped a deck of Fortran cards, that was part of my 'O'-level computer science project.

I quickly learned the value of line numbers

Old computer farts are us

[Calz]

I dropped a deck of Fortran cards, that was part of my 'O'-level computer science project.

I quickly learned the value of line numbers

Old computer farts are us

I was going to mention being one of the "lucky ones" who did not drop a deck ... but held off.

Glad you picked up on it.

:smash:

[Healthy Skeptic]

I dropped a deck of Fortran cards, that was part of my 'O'-level computer science project.

I quickly learned the value of line numbers

Old computer farts are us

I once dropped a '2000 card' card deck just before I fed it into a 'Card Eater'.
No Sequence Numbers of course!!
The 'Young Bucks' in this world have no understanding of what a 'disaster' it was!!

[Shamz]

I am a computer programmer now for last 11 years -- and everyone in this industry know how valuable his inventions are. First thing we learnt in school is C from his book that he co-authored.
May his soul R.I.P .

@Creator - we need more people like him - if you are listening or reading. Love

[haibane]

DOS was a 'rip-off' of UNIX adapted to run on the PC.

Nope, it wasn't. It was a rip-off of CP/M, an OS designed to run on the 8080 and Z80 CPUs, and compared to UNIX it's actually hard to even call it an operating system (monolithic, no multitasking, very little in terms of memory management, etc.). Some of the UNIX commands (I assume you mean the shell commands, right?) were actually adopted from preceding OSs.

I have to admit I hadn't been on very friendly terms with C and C-like languages until PHP came along, but I have to give Mr. Ritchie he did a darn good job - his OS makes much more sense than the mess that is Windows of any flavour (let's leave DOS out of that) and the C language AND that book brought a world of a difference to programming.

And the fact that he was pretty much unknown to public compared to Steve Jobs doesn't mean a thing : -) He will be remembered and his work used until the end of computing as we know it.

[Healthy Skeptic]

DOS was a 'rip-off' of UNIX adapted to run on the PC.
Nope, it wasn't. It was a rip-off of CP/M, an OS designed to run on the 8080 and Z80 CPUs, and compared to UNIX it's actually hard to even call it an operating system (monolithic, no multitasking, very little in terms of memory management, etc.). Some of the UNIX commands (I assume you mean the shell commands, right?) were actually adopted from preceding OSs.

Do you know the origins of CP/M and DOS?
Steve Jobs was a part of a 'break away' group of people that tried to design an OS (Operating System) for PCs. He went for CP/M. He then formed 'Apple'.
Another part of the 'break away' group was Bill Gates. He then formed (with a lot of Capital from IBM) Microsoft.

As far as CP/M is concerned, I programmed an CP/M computer for a company I worked for. It was an ECS-4500, built in Australia. It cost AU$7500 in 1980.
It had a 'whole' 64KB of memory and 2 500KB 5.25 'Floppy Disks'.
This was for a major 'Car Manufacturer' in Australia. (I shall not name).
So, when I refer to DOS being a 'rip off' UNIX, then I can also apply it to CP/M.
I just used the DOS 'reference' in my post because I assumed that nobody would have heard of CP/M!!

[Anchor]

Lol - I find it extremely fitting that we are seeing a geek fight on this thread (old geeks at that!) in a thread dedicated to the memory of one of the best.

More LOL

[haibane]

'kay. All the programming I ever did on CP/M was in dBASE II and a wee bit of Pascal, on a computer from East Germany, which I don't know the price of since there was no way an individual could buy such computer in my country. And I never dropped a deck of cards - they wouldn't let us even touch it at school (^__~ ) And later my mainframe OS was VM which also had a CLI and 'shell' commands.

But still - I can't see much in common between CP/M / DOS and UNIX in terms of either architecture (what would be the point for an OS that was pretty much merely a primitive file system / program loader for an 8080 and an 8" FDD, written in PL/M, working for a single anonymous user, and where the term 'user' was a synonym for a 'directory') or the shell commands.The fact that DOS and UNIX (obviously) share their roots, doesn't automatically mean DOS is derived from UNIX, regardless of the fact that DOS/Win later borrowed stuff from UNIX, because it just made sense. All I'm sayin' is there was other stuff, other OSs (even on DEC machines ;-) to rip off.

Peace (^__^ )

[haibane]

Lol - I find it extremely fitting that we are seeing a geek fight on this thread (old geeks at that!) in a thread dedicated to the memory of one of the best.More LOL
Yeah, right, my apologies for that. And I'm not THAT old. But this has, for some reason, awaken my fighting instincts from the long forgotten ages of the Amiga vs. Atari wars (I was an Amiga guy ;-)
I'll stop now. I promise.

[Healthy Skeptic]

Lol - I find it extremely fitting that we are seeing a geek fight on this thread (old geeks at that!) in a thread dedicated to the memory of one of the best.

More LOL

You are right!!
Time for an 'Old Fart' To 'SHUT UP'.
So, I will.
Love to all, especially Dennis Ritchie RIP.

[Mad Hatter]

1) RIP Mr Ritchie

2) High level languages...meh. Real 'hackers' only write machine code and the really good ones could utilise spindle rotation speed for timing... :p

OT...Always fun to watch was getting a noob engineer to pick up a 3350 spindle pack which hadn't quite stopped. So glad we got past card decks, have you any idea the bloody mayhem chads caused in the readers !!

[Healthy Skeptic]

1)
OT...Always fun to watch was getting a noob engineer to pick up a 3350 spindle pack which hadn't quite stopped. So glad we got past card decks, have you any idea the bloody mayhem chads caused in the readers !!

Yes , and that's why I have called them 'Card EATERS'.
What about an Operator that puts a New Disk Pack into a Disk Drive when the
Drive has a faulty sensor and the Spindle is still spinning?
OOOUUUCH! - For the Operator and the Disk Pack!!
Something that Gen Y, Z....etc will never understand :confused:

[CdnSirian]

A less-sung if not unknown creative person.

from:http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/10/dennis-ritchie-day.html

"Tim O'Reilly
Dennis Ritchie Day
On 10/30/11 let's remember the contributions of computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie.

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | +Tim O'Reilly | Comments: 26 | 26 October 2011

Dennis RitchieSunday, October 16 was declared Steve Jobs Day by California's Governor Brown. I admire Brown for taking a step to recognize Jobs' extraordinary contributions, but I couldn't help be struck by Rob Pike's comments on the death of Dennis Ritchie a few weeks after Steve Jobs. Pike wrote:

I was warmly surprised to see how many people responded to my Google+ post about Dennis Ritchie's untimely passing. His influence on the technical community was vast, and it's gratifying to see it recognized. When Steve Jobs died there was a wide lament — and well-deserved it was — but it's worth noting that the resurgence of Apple depended a great deal on Dennis' work with C and Unix.

The C programming language is quite old now, but still active and still very much in use. The Unix and Linux (and Mac OS X and I think even Windows) kernels are all C programs. The web browsers and major web servers are all in C or C++, and almost all of the rest of the Internet ecosystem is in C or a C-derived language (C++, Java), or a language whose implementation is in C or a C-derived language (Python, Ruby, etc.). C is also a common implementation language for network firmware. And on and on.

And that's just C.

Dennis was also half of the team that created Unix (the other half being Ken Thompson), which in some form or other (I include Linux) runs all the machines at Google's data centers and probably at most other server farms. Most web servers run above Unix kernels; most non-Microsoft web browsers run above Unix kernels in some form, even in many phones.

And speaking of phones, the software that runs the phone network is largely written in C.

But wait, there's more.

In the late 1970s, Dennis joined with Steve Johnson to port Unix to the Interdata. From this remove it's hard to see how radical the idea of a portable operating system was; back then OSes were mostly written in assembly language and were tightly coupled, both technically and by marketing, to specific computer brands. Unix, in the unusual (although not unique) position of being written in a "high-level language," could be made to run on a machine other than the PDP-11. Dennis and Steve seized the opportunity, and by the early 1980s, Unix had been ported by the not-yet-so-called open source community to essentially every mini-computer out there. That meant that if I wrote my program in C, it could run on almost every mini-computer out there. All of a sudden, the coupling between hardware and operating system was broken. Unix was the great equalizer, the driving force of the Nerd Spring that liberated programming from the grip of hardware manufacturers.

The hardware didn't matter any more, since it all ran Unix. And since it didn't matter, hardware fought with other hardware for dominance; the software was a given. Windows obviously played a role in the rise of the x86, but the Unix folks just capitalized on that. Cheap hardware meant cheap Unix installations; we all won. All that network development that started in the mid-80s happened on Unix, because that was the environment where the stuff that really mattered was done. If Unix hadn't been ported to the Interdata, the Internet, if it even existed, would be a very different place today.

I read in an obituary of Steve Jobs that Tim Berners-Lee did the first WWW development on a NeXT box, created by Jobs' company at the time. Well, you know what operating system ran on NeXT's, and what language.

For myself, I can attest that there would be no O'Reilly Media without Ritchie's work. It was Unix that created the fertile ground for our early publishing activities; it was Unix's culture of collaborative development and architecture of participation that was the deepest tap root of what became the open source software movement, and not coincidentally, much of the architecture of the Internet as well. These are the technologies I built my business around. Anyone who has built their software or business with knowledge from O'Reilly books or conferences can trace their heritage back to Ritchie and his compatriots.

I don't have the convening power of a Governor Brown, but for those of us around the world who care, I hereby declare this Sunday, October 30 to be Dennis Ritchie Day! Let's remember the contributions of this computing pioneer.

P.S. Help spread the word. Use the hashtag #DennisRitchieDay on Twitter and Google+

[marielle]

I think many of these open source code monkeys are really wanderers and their purpose is to code. ;)

The internet has allowed the world to "wake up", at least those with the intention of waking up, and open source, unix, and C are responsible for a free and open internet.

[meredith]

"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." - Jeremy S. Anderson

[CdnSirian]

Ha ha. Didn't LSD come from Switzerland? Would have to check.:)

[ThePythonicCow]

On 10/30/11 let's remember the contributions of computing pioneer Dennis Ritchie.

Dennis passed away on October 12, 2011 and the memorial described in the newly started "Dennis Ritchie remembered" thread happened a few days ago.

So I have merged that thread into the Dennis Ritchie thread that was started earlier.