I just read the lwn.net - Linux Weekly news 's website the
very sad news that one of the greatest modern day computer heroes
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie after a long illness has passed
away in his home.
The original notification for this grieving news are on
Rob Pike's Google Plus wall , this is the original
message:
Rob Pike - 1:02 AM - 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.
For all those who haven't heard about Dennis Ritchie , he
was a computer scientist who developed the C Programming
language and had an immeasurable influence on all kind of
Modern programming.
Dennis worked on the development of Unix's predecessor Multics as
well as with Ken Thompson worked together in Bell Labs and are
practically the fathers of UNIX. Unix the Seventh Edition source code has later become the
basis for the early UNIX BSD distributions. Among the most
important technical contributions Dennis has done is the
introduction of a Streams mechanism - pipes - (as called today in
GNU/Linux and BSD and other unices).
Ritchie's C Language creation on top of Ken Thompson's B
Programming language has been standartized and become the de-facto
standard for almost every modern existing OS around.
Moreover dmr has been among the co-creators of Plan 9 Operating system (which
is currently open-source distributed) as well as coded a few bits
for the Inferno OS which today is known under the code name
Vita Nuova
dmr (the hacker nickname of Dennis) lines up across the most
notable computer hackers of all times. He received U.S. national
Medal of Technology in 1999 from president Bill Clinton for his
contributions to co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the
creation of C Language
To sum it up DMR is just an "icon" in the computer geek
world and his memory will surely live forever in the hacker
undeground and computer geek culture.
A few quotes dmr is so famous with:
"I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the
demigodic party."
"Usenet is a strange place."
"UNIX is very simple, it just needs a genius to understand its
simplicity."
"C is quirky, flawed, and an enormous success."
"We really didn't buy it thinking we'd have this enormous
investment."
Here is also a short video telling a few words of UNIX history and
showing Dennis Ritchie in his UNIX development years: