Friday 9 September 2016

Happy birthday, Dennis Ritchie

1941 was clearly a vintage year. Today would have been the 75th birthday of probably the least well-known but the most significant of the people I have been celebrating since May (Bob Dylan's anniversary). Dennis Ritchie was a pioneer of the Unix operating system and of the C programming language. Unix is the system of choice for minicomputers and most software development across a range of IT depends on C. Unix inspired the development of Linux, which in turn spawned the operating systems of many smartphones.


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