Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011

Dennis Ritchie died October 8. Like Steve Jobs, he was a pioneer of modern computing. But he wasn't a brilliant visionary marketing guy. He was a brilliant visionary coding guy.

Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language and a key developer of the Unix operating system, and as co-author of the definitive book on C, The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie).

Ritchie's invention of C and his role in the development of UNIX alongside Ken Thompson has placed him as an important pioneer of modern computing.

Underneath the hood
of the MacBook Pro
is OS X,
and Unix makes it go.