Computer science is one of those fields of study in which geniuses prove their worth on their own merits . What millions of people enjoy today is the product of the work of some ‘ hippies ‘ who locked themselves in their garages and learned how to communicate with a computer and make it do their bidding , which shaped one of the most amazing machines ever created by the man and that has ended up being applied in almost everything that surrounds us . Names like Ada Lovelace , Alan Turing, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak or Bill Gates will sound familiar to most, but the list is much longer. Today we want to highlight Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C programming language and the UNIX operating system .
In addition to being one of the best-known computer scientists in the world , Dennis Ritchie won two of the accolades reserved for the greatest: the Turing Prize ( Computer science award given by the Association for Computational Machinery each year) in 1983. , for developing the theory of generic operating systems and implementing it to the UNIX system, and the United States National Medal of Technology in 1998 , for his important contribution to the development of informatics and computing.
However, Ritchie will not be remembered for his accolades but for laying the foundation for modern computing . In 1969 , Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson developed the UNIX operating system at AT & T’s Bell Labs. It was an operating system that offered small programs with very clear objectives and a command language known as ‘ shell ‘ that allowed these programs to be combined to perform more complex actions .
This basic simplicity from which it started was justified if we consider that it is an open source operating system, so that anyone could modify and customize it according to their preferences and needs. UNIX became a small but very efficient system that, not being designed for any specific purpose, was capable of doing almost everything. It was based on users developing their operating system with clear, simple and short code that others could understand and take advantage of to keep it growing.
Precisely as a complement to the UNIX operating system, it introduced the C programming language in 1972 . A direct heir to the B programming language, it had been developed at Bell Laboratories and was geared towards the implementation of operating systems , being especially efficient and quickly becoming the most widely used programming language for creating system and application software. This language uses middle-level typed static data (deals with basic objects such as characters or numbers) and provides some leeway to programmers, as it has low checking for errors and leaves actions that other languages perform themselves at the discretion of the programmer.
On October 12, 2011 , just days after Steve Jobs’ death, a former partner of Dennis Ritchie announced his death at the age of 70 .
