as co-inventor of Unix and C programming language, played a key role in shaping today's computing environment

American computer scientist Dennis Ritchie, who died aged 70 after a long illness, was one of the co-inventors of Unix operating system and programming language C. Unix and C as long as the software infrastructure and tools created many of today's computing environment - the Internet for smart phones - and thus played a central role in shaping the modern world

. Origins

Unix

back to early 1960, long before the chip and the PC was invented. The closest thing to a personal computer is called computer. It was a large central computer used at the same time and at great expense, by a couple of dozen users sitting at the typewriter terminals.

in the middle of the decade, the usefulness of the computer that seemed to offer the way forward, and a consortium of General Electric, Bell Labs and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has launched a project called Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service). Multics is in use the world's largest information technology, supporting hundreds of simultaneous users. Bell Labs was responsible for the operation of the software.

Ritchie joined the Bell Laboratories division programming in 1967. His father, Alistair Ritchie, has had a long career there, and had co-authored an influential book techniques, the design of switching circuits (1951). Alistair was born to Dennis and his wife Jean, a suburb north of Bronxville New York, and raised in New Jersey, where Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill took place. He studied physics and applied mathematics in a BA (1963) and computer to earn a doctorate (1968) at Harvard University.

Multics was in crisis when it comes to the research organization. In fact, many large software projects have been in crisis - people began to learn that writing large programs was terribly difficult and expensive. In 1969, after four years of development, the Bell Labs withdrew from the project.

Ritchie and lead programmer on Multics, Ken Thompson, they were somewhat lacking in the disappearance of the project. Multics had promised a great computing experience, but the operating system is too complex to be built. This led to rethink their philosophy of the software. They build a simple, smaller system called Unix -. The name was "a kind of pun on Multics dangerous," said Ritchie once

The idea was not immediately appreciated by their bosses, and they had to "beg around" outdated equipment to develop Unix. The team had only 16 kilobytes of memory, and it was only an incentive to keep things simple. If Multics was the victim of the baroque architecture of software and Unix is ??pure Bauhaus.

Unix was designed for a period of several months in 1969, and a working prototype by early next year. His colleagues are not convinced. However, by offering to write software for word processing, Ritchie and Thompson managed to persuade the Bell Labs patent department to acquire a computer running Unix size on it.

decided to rewrite the entire operating system for the new machine. The first version of Unix was written in native machine code computer, which was difficult and slow. For the next version of Unix, Ritchie invented a new language called C, which bridged the gap between machine code and programming languages ??like Fortran and Cobol.

C also had an interesting ancestry. The parent has a language designed all the universities of Cambridge and London in 1964 and known as the CPL (Combined Programming Language). CPL is not survived, but one of the development team, Martin Richards, has become a visitor at MIT. There, he designed a simplified version of the language of the application systems, BCPL (Basic CPL).

Universities
Ritchie and Thompson won the early recognition of his work when he received the 1983 Turing Award from the Association of Computing Machinery, often referred to as the Nobel Prize of computing. But the history of Unix was beginning. Projects Agency Advanced Research, Department of Defense Unix adopted for the survey on the network that eventually created the Internet, and is the glue that binds the software.

Steve Jobs was a devotee of Unix. When he was expelled from Apple Computer in 1985, used under Unix as a base for next workstation. After his return to Apple ten years later, took him and Unix became the basis for all current Apple products.
Unix