|
|
此文章由 limit-2010 原创或转贴，不代表本站立场和观点，版权归 oursteps.com.au 和作者 limit-2010 所有！转贴必须注明作者、出处和本声明，并保持内容完整
Software ace had a knack with languages, top scoring with C
October 19, 2011
Dennis Ritchie was a computer scientist who joined Bell Labs in the late 1960s, wrote the popular C programming language and helped develop the Unix operating system.
Ritchie is best known for his contributions to computer programming and software. The C programming language, which he developed in the early 1970s, is still popular. It has gone through a number of upgrades, and it is commonly used for website development and other computer tasks. The Unix operating software also surged in popularity. The software and its offshoots, including the open-source Linux, are widely used today, in corporate servers and even mobile phones.
Dennis Ritchie was born on September 9, 1941, in Bronxville, New York. His father, Alistair, was a systems engineer at Bell Labs and his mother, Jean, was a homemaker. After studying physics and maths at Harvard University, Ritchie joined Bell Labs in 1967.
''My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat,'' Ritchie wrote. ''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.''
At Bell, Ritchie and a colleague, Kenneth Thompson, worked closely to create Unix. In writing the C language, Ritchie built on Thompson's earlier B language. Their collaborations were intended to simplify operating systems and make the software portable and easy to move from existing hardware to new computers, resulting in the open-source movement of sharing ideas.
The idea was not immediately appreciated by their managers at Bell, and they had to use an obsolete computer on which to develop Unix. The machine had just 16 kilobytes of memory.
Unix was designed over a few months in 1969, and a prototype was running in early 1970. Their colleagues remained unconvinced. However, by offering to write some text-processing software, Ritchie and Thompson managed to persuade the Bell Labs patent department to acquire a full-size computer and run Unix on it.
They decided to rewrite the operating system entirely for the new machine. The first version of Unix had been written in the computer's native machine code, which was difficult and slow. For the next version, Ritchie invented a language called C, which bridged the gap between machine code and programming languages such as Fortran and Cobol.
Ritchie and Thompson gained early recognition for their work when they received the 1983 Turing award of the Association of Computing Machinery. But the Unix story was just beginning. The Advanced Projects Research Agency of the US department of defence adopted Unix for the network research that eventually created the internet, and it remains the software glue that binds everything together.
Ritchie retired from Bell Labs, as head of systems software research, in 2007. He is survived by two brothers and a sister.
Los Angeles Times; Guardian News & Media
http://m.smh.com.au/national/obi ... 20111018-1lymh.html |
|
【三刀厨侠争霸赛】三刀的午餐 (2008-10-5) cctang 
楼主:bulaohu
发表于 2011-10-18 22:00
