Dennis Ritchie – An Unsung Hero
Douglas Heaven on the passing of the mind behind C
The world has lost two giants of technology in as many weeks. The news that Dennis Ritchie died on 12 October, aged 70, after enduring cancer and heart disease for several years, elicited a quieter response than that for Steve Jobs. Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language and one of the co-inventors of the UNIX operating system, which means we’re living in a world Ritchie helped to invent.
“When Steve Jobs died last week, therewas a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified”, said Rob Pike, a colleague of Ritchie’s, speaking to Wired. “But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn’t even know who he is.”
Pretty much all of the daily interactions wehave with technology owe something to Ritchie’s creations 40 years ago. The internet is built on UNIX, from the server farms behind Google and Amazon to the router through which you’re locally connected. Your TV probably runs an operating system based on UNIX. As does your Mac, your iPhone, your iPad – OS X and iOS are built on a UNIX variant - and of course any Linux machine.
Then there’s C, the language in which UNIX – and a vast amount of other software from the core of Windows to MATLAB – is written. And when software isn’t written in C there’s a very good chance it’s written in a language descended from, or heavily influenced by, Ritchie’s creation, whether C++, Java, or C#.
UNIX was developed by Ritchie and Ken Thompson at AT&T’s Bell Labs in the 60s after the project they had been working on – an ambitious multi-user operating system known as Multics – was dropped by the company for being too complex. Young, idealistic, and stubborn, Ritchie and Thompson decided to build a simpler, streamlined version of the operating system by themselves: Unics – or UNIX – a pun on Multics, was soon born.
C was designed by Ritchie initially as a means to an end in developing his new operating system, but its versatility and ability to be compiled to differentcomputer architectures quickly made it an enormously useful tool. The C Programming Language, the book Ritchie wrote with Brian Kernighan, setting out the standard definition of the C language, has become a classic.
Due to its official status as a telecoms monopoly, AT&T was at first unable to enter the computer industry and thus unable to market this new operating system it suddenly had its hands on. So Ritchie and Thompson simply gave their creations away to friends and colleagues in universities, who used them to teach a generation of programmers, engineers, and computer scientists.
Even more crucially, Ritchie’s initial free dissemination of UNIX and C led to the free software movement. When AT&T eventually wriggled itself into a position where it could make money from UNIX, MIT researcher Richard Stallman started making a free version of UNIX under the GNU (Gnu’s Not UNIX) umbrella. GNU – along with its Linux kernel and myriad satellite utilities – is at the core of everything open source.
It’s so easy to forget about the countless, unsleeping machines behind the slickness of today’s interactions with technology, but Ritchie lives on in the hearts of most of them. Now’s a good time to spare a thought both for them and him.
