Dennis Ritchie [b. 1941) is idolized by computer programmers all over the world. Why? Because he wrote what is, without a doubt, the most widely used programming language in the world.
After gaining undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard, Ritchie went to work for Bell Laboratories in 1968. It was there, alongside Ken Thompson (b. 1943), that he created the UNIX operating system. At the time, Bell Labs was using a programming language called "B," which was used to write UNIX. Building on this operating system, Ritchie, in his own words, "added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language, thus producing the new language 'C.'"
This new language, designed to be used with the UNIX operating system, is general purpose and, critically, was written to allow ft to be "ported," or transferred from one type of computer to another. At the time, Ritchie and Thompson had been working with their B language on a PDP-7 computer and, when Bell Labs acquired one of the new PDP-11S, they understandably wanted to switch over to the more powerful machine. It was B's inability to take advantage of the new features of the PDP-11 that led Ritchie to come up with early versions of C, which he used to rewrite their UNIX operating system so it could be ported to the new computer.
Thus the bulky PDP-11, complete with magnetic tape drive, became the first major computer to use C. The flexibility and simplicity of the language means it is still used, along with UNIX, on modern PCs and by real programmers. Ritchie and Thompson received the U.S. National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999 for their work on UNIX and C.
