Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was the father of the C programming language and co-creator, with Ken Thompson, of UNIX operating system.

Life

Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941 Bronxville, New York, and he graduated from Harvard University with degrees in physics and applied mathematics.
Dennis Ritchie stated:

My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat. My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones.

In 1967, Ritchie joined Bell Labs, where with Ken Thompson they created UNIX, firstly released in 1969. Initially it was named UNICS and it was created in a low-level assembly. Mostly, Ritchie contribution was about the language and I/O system.
He ended up developing C, a higher-level language designed to allow cross-platform programming.

Ritchie worked for many years in the same office under different companies, from Bell Labs, Bell Laboratories, AT&T Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies to Alcatel-Lucent as of 2006.

Work

Dennis Ritchie invented C language and helped Ken Thompson to create the UNIX operating system
As Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language said:

Dennis managed to find a perfect balance between expressiveness and efficiency. It was just right for creating systems programs like compilers, editors, and even operating systems. C made it possible for a programmer to get close to the machine for efficiency but remain far enough away to avoid being tied to a specific machine... As a result, C became in effect a universal assembler: close enough to the machine to be cost effective, but far enough away that a C program could be compiled for and run well on any machine.

As a manager of a small group of researchers, he promoted also exploration of distributed operating systems, languages, and routing/switching hardware. Notable works are the Plan 9 operating system and the Inferno operating system.

Death

In october 12 of 2011 he was found dead at the age of 70, after he had suffered of heart disease and prostate cancer for several years. His death came only one week after the death of Steve Jobs but it did not receive much media coverage.
Computer historian Paul E. Ceruzzi stated:

Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but... if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you'd see his work everywhere inside.

Awards

In 1983, Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.

In 1997, both Ritchie and Thompson were made Fellows of the Computer History Museum, for co-inventing the UNIX operating system, and for development of the C programming language.

On April 21, 1999, Thompson and Ritchie received the National Medal of Technology of 1998 from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which, according to the citation for the medal,

led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age.

In 2005, the Industrial Research Institute awarded Ritchie with its Achievement Award in recognition of his contribution to science and technology, and to society generally, with his development of the Unix operating system.

In 2011, Ritchie, along with Thompson, was awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications for his work in the development of the Unix operating system