ĭuring the 1960s, Ritchie and Ken Thompson worked on the Multics operating system at Bell Labs. In 2020, the Computer History museum worked with Ritchie's family and Fischer's family and found a copy of the lost dissertation. However, Ritchie never officially received his PhD degree as he did not submit a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library, a requirement for the degree. In 1967, Ritchie began working at the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center, and in 1968, he defended his PhD thesis on 'Computational Complexity and Program Structure' at Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C.

Version 7 Unix for the PDP-11, including Dennis Ritchie's home directory: /usr/dmr He was the 'R' in K&R C, and commonly known by his username dmr. Ritchie was the head of Lucent Technologies System Software Research Department when he retired in 2007. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from the ACM in 1983, the Hamming Medal from the IEEE in 1990 and the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton in 1999. He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. October 12, 2011) was an American computer scientist.

Computer History Museum Fellow (1997) ĭennis MacAlistair Ritchie (Septem– c.