Dennis Ritchie, C programming, Unix

[mooncliff]

Dennis Ritchie, a computer scientist who wrote the popular C programming language and helped develop the Unix operating system, has died. He was 70.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituari...tory?track=rss

[jpatter666]

Re: Dennis Ritchie, C programming, Unix

Dennis Ritchie, a computer scientist who wrote the popular C programming language and helped develop the Unix operating system, has died. He was 70.

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituari...tory?track=rss

Steve Jobs goes to heaven and creates heavenly apps -- but can't find a heavenly OS to run them on. So they call for the master....

[sunpearl71]

Re: Dennis Ritchie, C programming, Unix

I'm reminded of the days when we learnt C-language from Ritchie's book and trying out programming for Unix in college. RIP Ritchie.

[*T*]

Re: Dennis Ritchie, C programming, Unix

Legend.

[Sharky]

Re: Dennis Ritchie, C programming, Unix

I first met Dennis Ritchie in about 1979. He was a regular attendee of Unix conferences back then, participated in newsgroups, and responded quickly to direct emails and phone calls. He seems to be most remembered for co-authoring the C Programming Language book with Brian Kernighan -- but he was also responsible for coding large parts of the early versions of Unix, along with Ken Thompson. Although they collaborated on the system as a whole, as I remember it, Ken focused more on the OS, while Dennis wrote the C compiler and many of the early utilities.

A short personal story: I remember an interesting event with Dennis at the Unix conference in Toronto in 1983. George Goble (a well-known Unix dev from Purdue) offered to take Dennis, Ken and I up in a small plane, from Toronto to see Niagara Falls from the air -- we joked about what a disaster it would be for the Unix world if the plane crashed. I'm pretty sure that Dennis had never been in a small plane before that. Great fun.

I'll always remember him as being bright, friendly, with a very sharp wit and typical engineer's sense of humor.

RIP.

[jpatter666]

Re: Dennis Ritchie, C programming, Unix

One of my favorite stories I heard was how they put one of the first "back doors" into UNIX. For the non-techies, a backdoor is a way to subvert the security of a system.

In this case, code was added to the login program to allow for a specific password which would *always* allow access. Nice, but easily found, right? Just look at the source, remove the offending code and recompile.

Not so -- remember who is writing the compiler.

The *compiler* was rewritten such that if login was compiled and it did not have this code, it would add it. Even better, if the compiler was recompiled and did not have the code, the compiler would add it to its own compile.

Then the offending source was removed from both programs, everything recompiled and -- voila. Backdoor installed and you could look through the source all day and never find a clue. The only way out was to use a different compiler.

Wow....that story brings back memories....