Dennis Ritchie was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a B.S. in mathematics in 1951. He worked as a programmer at GE Aircraft Engines for three years and then entered his first job as a programmer at Bell Laboratories. In February 1955 he joined the team that developed the first version of the UNIX operating system, which was released in September of that year
In December 1957 he began working on a new programming language, which would eventually become C, and his team produced the first C compiler, one of the most important contributions to science and technology ever made by a Bell Lab employee. In April 1969 he joined AT&T's Advanced Computing Systems Division as an assistant director and became manager of its Structured Programming Group. In October 1971 he was promoted to director of the division's Software Systems Research Center (SSRC), where he led a team that created Unix System III Release 2.
In March 1976 he became SSRC's chief architect and remained in that job until his retirement in February 1983. When he retired from AT&T, Ritchie was the only operator-programmer to have been assigned to four different research centers during his career.
My work was fairly theoretical. It was in recursive function theory. And in particular, hierarchies of functions in terms of computational complexity. I got involved in real computers and programming mainly by being - well, I was interested even as I came to graduate school.Dennis Ritchie
For infrastructure technology, C will be hard to displace.Dennis Ritchie
