Dennis Ritchie is a computer scientist most well-known for his work with Kenneth Thompson in creating UNIX, a computer operating system. Ritchie also went on to develop the high-level and enormously popular computer programming language C. For their work on the UNIX operating system, Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the prestigious Turing Award by the Association for Computer Machinery (ACM) in 1983.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born in Bronxville, New York, on September 9, 1941, and grew up in New Jersey, where his father, Alistair Ritchie, worked as a switching systems engineer for Bell Laboratories. His mother, Jean McGee Ritchie, was a homemaker. Ritchie went to Harvard University, where he received his B.S. in Physics in 1963. However, a lecture he attended on the operation of Harvard's computer system, a Univac I, led him to develop an interest in computing in the early 1960s. Thereafter, Ritchie spent a considerable amount of...