Dennis Ritchie , the great person was an American
computer scientist who helped shape the modern digital
era by creating software tools that power everything
from search engines like Google to smart phones. He
created the C programming language which is the mother
of various programming languages. He also was the
co-creator of UNIX operating system with his long-time
colleague Ken Thompson.

The first version of Unix had been written in a primitive
programming language known as machine code , but it proved
cumbersome and slow. So Ritchie invented a new language
called C. By the early 1970s five people were working on
Unix, and it soon had a long list of commands it could
carry out, written in C. Such is its utility in the modern
world of computing that Unix has been described as
“the best screwdriver ever built”. The operating system
powers many of the world’s data centres, such as those at
Google and Amazon, and its technology serves as the
foundation of many different operating systems.

Steve Jobs used Unix as the basis for his next computer
workstation,and later it became the foundation for
Apple’s smartphones and other products. In addition,
computer languages such as C++ and Java were built on
the C language that Ritchie devised. Meanwhile, the Unix
philosophy of free access inspired the open source software
movement and its Unix variant, Linux, which now powers
most of the servers on which the internet depends.

Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award from the
ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990
and the National Medal of Technology  from President
Clinton in 1999. In 1997, both Ritchie and Thompson
were made Fellows of the Computer History Museum, "for
co-creation of the UNIX operating system, and for development
of the C programming language."In 2011, Ritchie, along with
Thompson, was awarded the Japan Prize for Information
and Communications for his work in the development of
Unix operating system.

This great person passed away at his age 70 on October 12,2011.