The C Man

Much before the world had even heard the term open systems, two computer scientists at the then AT&T Bell Labs, decided to try something completely unheard of. They tried to see if they could port an operating system, developed by them, along with a few more colleagues a couple of years back, to different machines. One of them, Dennis Ritchie, thought the best way to do that was to create a high level programming language and recode the entire operating systemUNIXin that language. The operating system, originally written in machine language in 1969 was almost entirely rewritten in Cthe new language that Ritchie developed
by 1973.

Anyone reading this in Dataquest does not have to be told what and how much UNIX and C have contributed to the computing world in particular, and the world, in general.

Yet, when on October 12, 2011, Ritchie was found dead in his house, there was little coverage in traditional media and the web. While the serious computing community was shaken by his death, the world at large, which was still mourning the death of Steve Jobs who had passed away a week back, did not even notice it. In any case, few outside the tech community knewor know todaywho he was.

In reality, anyone who uses internet or anyone who uses a computing device today is doing that because of the contribution made by dmr, wrote a blogger. Ritchie was popularly known as dmr, his user name.

Pretty much everything on the web uses those two things: C and UNIX, Wired.com site said, quoting Rob Pike, Ritchies ex-colleague, current Google employee and co-author of one of the most popular books on UNIX systems programming, Unix Programming Environment. The browsers are written in C. The UNIX kernelthat pretty much the entire internet runs onis written in C, Pike was further quoted by the site.

That pretty much gives an idea of the direct impact that C has had on the computing worldand today, on the internet, that has taken computing to pretty much everybodys lives.

The indirect impact is much more. C was the first step to achieve what are today called portability, open, and interoperability. It allowed programmers to write codes without bothering so much about what machine the programs would run on. That was a small step for those who wanted to port UNIX to machines other than pdp11, the DEC machine on which it was created. But that was a giant leap for the computing world.

That is not all. C influenced almost all the languages and environments that followedbe it C++ or Java. Most of these conceptually borrowed from the syntax of C. Many even call them C derivatives.

UNIX, to the development of which Ritchie greatly contributed, is even today in its different avatar is the de facto OS for anything that is mission-critical. Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Linuxall these are derived from UNIX.

While Ritchie, along with Ken Thompson, won the Turing award in 1983, and did win the National Medal of Technology from the US president in 1999, his contributions are still not recognized enough.

Dataquest joins the programmers community in mourning the death of this computing titan.