He invented the C programming language. He is one of the co-creators of Unix. He has watched more than one multi-billion dollar industry evolve around his creations. And still, Dennis Ritchie shows up for work each day in the same Murray Hill, NJ office where he and Ken Thompson first ran Unix on a Digital Equipment Corp. PDP-7 back in 1969. Why? Well, it’s not just any old company that employs Ritchie. This is Lucent’s Bell Labs we’re talking about - the home of the laser, the place where the transistor first saw life. It’s a pretty exciting work environment, and, as Ritchie is fond of saying, it’s nice to walk around your office and stumble into things like canisters of liquid helium. It was at his nondescript office, right next to where Unix was invented, that Ritchie met with Linux Magazine’s Robert McMillan and Adam Goodman.” More at Linux Magazine.
Dennis Ritchie Put the C in Compiler
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Kernighan and Ritchie are gods!!!
Learned programming direct from thier book.
I have the original copy. It’s gone slightly
brown from either the acid reacting in the paper
or all the times I spilled dinner on it…
I can empathize regarding the liquid helium containers.
We have liquid nitrogen at our office. Damn tank was
always in the way. Finally we moved it outside.
It’s a real pain filling a small dewar *in the rain*.
Froze my shoe to the pavement one day, when I spilled.
I really can empathize…….
This was a wonderfull article. I love how he basicly said “no, i could realy care less about Linux and gpl.” Funny comments to be posting on the Linux mag site. You gota love that Ritchie, funny funny guy
I found Ritchie’s comments to be intelligent and varied, despite the obviously pointed and one-eyed questions that the interviewer asked – continuing to almost expect Ritchie to praise and laud linux and open source as the great success of Unix and Computing.
Instead, Ritchie came out well-rounded and showed that he possessed a certain intelligent approach to the questions.
Reading this interview makes one glad that Dennis Richie is one of the people behind the start of the *NIX phenomenon.
He is so polite but here and there you can see his opinion about Linux.
“semi-modern OS”, Ken’s hate mail story, FreeBSD within 45 seconds from his desk, Linus (The-All-Mighty-God-Linus) is more of project manager than coder…
Professional.
This isn’t a deliberate slap… just some honest comments from someone who has a decent grip on reality (and knows better than most).
When Ritchie said that Linus is “more a project manager than a coder”, he meant it as a compliment. Managing people, especially in such a massive project as Linux, is WAY harder than it is to code a computer.
If anything is a slap, it’s that you can see in the pictures he’s running Windows on his PC