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Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941 and died on October 12, 2011.
He was an American computational scientist.
He was a collaborator in the development of operating systems such as Multics and Unix. In the same way, he helped to develop several programming languages like C, about which he wrote a book on computer science together with Brian Wilson Kernighan, entitled El lenguaje de programming C.
In 1983 he received a Turing award for his theory of generic operating systems and its implementation in the form of the Unix system.
Later, in 1998, he was awarded the National Medal of Technology of the United States of America.
In 2007 he celebrated, being the head of the department of research in software systems of Alcatel-Lucent.
Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York. He obtained two degrees at Harvard, in applied physics and mathematics.
In 1967 he began working at Bell Laboratories, where he participated with the work teams that developed Multics, BCPL, ALTRAN and the B programming language.
His biggest recognition is for having been the creator of the C programming language and for co-creating together with Ken Thompson, from the Unix operating system.
Today, the programming language C is widely used in the development of applications and operating systems, and has served as an influence for the development of other modern languages, such as Java.
PRIZES
In 1979, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson received the NEC C&C award for their contribution in the field of generic operating systems and the development of Unix.
In 1983, Dennis and Thompson received a Turing award for their development of the generic theory of operating systems.
In 1990, Ritchie and Thompson received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, for the development of the C programming language and the Unix operating system.
On April 21, 1999, Ritchie and Thompson jointly received the 1998 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton.
In 2011, the two personalities were awarded with the Japan Prize for Information and Communications for the work in the development of Unix.
At the age of 70, Dennis Ritchie died at night, in the company of his family. His friend Robert Pike was the first to give the news through the social network Google +.
As a tribute, the DNU/Linux Fedora 16 distribution was dedicated to him, after a month of his death.
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