BIL 101 HOMEWORK 1

YUSUF
PATOLU
151044027

Yusuf Patolu 151044027 BIL 101 HW 1

28 Eyll 2015

DENNIS RITCHIE: FATHER OF C AND UNIX

He was a physicist:
His full name is Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie. He was born September 9, 1941 in Bronxville , NY . He
studied Mathematics and Physics in Harvard University. But he didnt become physicist or mathematician.
Because of he said : My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a
physicist, and that computers were quite neat. My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not
smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better
than functional ones. Also he was interested in computer science. So he decided to head programming and
systems. He graduated from Harvard University and joined Bell Laboratories with his friend Ken
Thompson. They were working on computing theory and programming languages. He also worked in
Multics project and wrote a complier for ALTRAN Technologies.

Unix, the Keystone :

After these, Ritchie and Ken started to lay the foundation of Unix operating system.Many people thinks
that just Dennis Ritchie created Unix operating system. But they created it with Ken Thompson. Like he
said : "It began in 1969 when Ken Thompson discovered a little-used PDP-7 computer and set out to
fashion a computing environment that he liked. Thompson wrote the first version of Unix for a Digital
Equipment Corporation PDP-7 in a month, using a cross-assembler that ran on GECOS. The PDP-7 he
used had 4K of 18-bit words. His work soon attracted me; I joined in the enterprise, though most of the
ideas, and most of the work for that matter, were his." [1]

Figure 1 : Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritc3hie

Yusuf Patolu 151044027 BIL 101 HW 1

28 Eyll 2015
Unix wasnt like other operating systems.Because Unix was able to improve itself by users. So they
achieved such a phenomenal success for whole computing world.Also he was thinking that Unix was so
simple operating system. If you want to understand this simple thing you need to be genius. He was
thinking like that.

Figure 2 : This picture shows us Denniss works were so important.

Creator of C language :
Ken Thompson was working on a language named with B. Dennis joined him and improved it to C. The
keystone of computer world. We owe Dennis for his works. These things which he done, is so important.
He gave first sample of C programming language like this :
main( ) {
printf(Hello, World);
}

Today we using it for improve operating systems, applications etc. About C subject , Dennis said : In the
same place, same time everybody could do the same This explains he also has a nice thinking style and
character.

His late life and awards :

He earned Turing award in 1983 with Thompson. Also got National Medal of Technology in 1999 with
Thompson again.
Ritchie worked on Plan 9 and Inferno in his late life, then retired in 2007.And he passed away in October
12, 2011.

Yusuf Patolu 151044027 BIL 101 HW 1

28 Eyll 2015

References
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie
http://people.rit.edu/sd9253/105/project2/
https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/
http://amturing.acm.org/award_winners/ritchie_1506389.cfm [1]