Set up

• Dennis Ritchie
  
  Bell Labs, Rm 2C-517
  
  600 Mountain Ave.
  
  Murray Hill, Current Jersey 07974-0636, USA
• dmr@bell-labs.com
• +1 908-582-3770 (office), +1 908-582-5857 (fax)

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In Memoriam

Dennis died in early October, 2011.
That is an illustration from his sister and brothers:

As Dennis’s siblings, Lynn, John, and Invoice Ritchie–on behalf of the total Ritchie family–we wished to screech to all of you how deeply moved, astonished, and appreciative we’re of the loving tributes to Dennis that we now had been reading. We are in a position to substantiate what we opt listening to time and again:

Dennis became an unfailingly form, candy, unassuming, and worthwhile brother–and obviously a total geek. He had a hilariously dry sense of humor, and a enthusiastic appreciation for existence’s absurdities–despite the proven fact that his world look became entirely devoid of cynicism or mean-spiritedness.

We are terribly sad to hang misplaced him, but touched beyond phrases to like what a designate he made on the area, and how properly his light personality–beyond his accomplishments–appears to be like to be understood.

Lynn, John, and Invoice Ritchie

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History

For a pair of years, I labored in the Computing Sciences Study Middleof Bell Labs. On October 2005, a reorganization redistributed this
group, and I’m now with the heart called viathe marginally ungainly title of Convergence, Tool and Computer Science
Laboratory (but composed in the identical office).
This skills has been extra assorted than it
could more than doubtless seem; here’s more than doubtless the most history:

After I joined in 1967, Bell Labs became an organization collectively owned viaAmerican Phone and Telegraph Firm and its subsidiary
Western Electrical. Its genuine title became Bell Phone Laboratories, Integrated.

Rapidly after, Ken Thompson, alongside with me and
others, first started work on Unix.
Also soon after, AT&T, which composed owned many of the Bell Machine,
updated its emblem (I doubt the events were connected).
The novel emblem factual updated the image; company structureremained the identical. The fabric printed by us sooner or later ofthe duration up to 1984 aged this
Bell emblem and the title “Bell Laboratories.”

In 1984, AT&T, under a negotiated consent decree,
divested the local phone businessesit had owned and in the intention gave up the Bell emblem
and the Bell title excluding in reference to Bell Laboratories.
Bell Phone Laboratories Inc. became dissolved as a companyand became an integrated unit of AT&T.
We misplaced the Wehrmacht helmet and obtained the Deathstar,
and now identified ourselves as working at “AT&T Bell Laboratories.”

In 1996, AT&T (this time voluntarily) spun off its techniques
and technology organizations into Lucent Applied sciences, whilstAT&T kept the companies industry. Bell Labs
stayed mostly with Lucent, despite the proven fact that some of our colleagues helped
fabricate a brand novel AT&T labs, grand as some of us went to Bellcore in 1984.
The novel company emblem on the total comprises the twin carriageway “Bell Labs Innovations.”

Lucent and Alcatel merged as of Dec 1, 2006.
One other novel title and emblem! and composed the identical office.

Bell Labs has remained a remarkably superior residence to
function work that has enduring affect over the lengthy shuffle,
irrespective of what the firm, the courts, the PR sorts
or higher administration opt could more than doubtless composed
be our title and emblem on a given day or yr.

Some cloth

Assorted issues I have been enthusiastic with
could maybe be found in in HTML, PostScript or PDF.
Some are papers of mine or by others, some are factual interestingincunabula. They’re organized by category.

Unix papers and writings, approximately chronological

• Unix Programmer’s Manual, First Edition (1971)
  Online page scan or Postscript (by procedure of OCR) of existence prior to pipes or grep were invented.
• Notes for a Unix talk circa 1972
• `The Unix Time-sharing Machine,’ the 1978 BSTJ update
  of the 1974 C. ACM article by me and Ken Thompson
  originally describing Unix:
  
  browsable,
  or PostScript
  or PDF.
• `The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing Machine,’
  an epic of developments sooner or later of 1968-1973.
  
  browsable,
  or printable PostScript or
  PDF
• A Memo from 1976 that proposes
  procuring a machine to which to port Unix, and the types of adjustments that will more than doubtless also be neededin C to derive this imaginable. Despite the proven fact that the memo itself is
  slightly skilled forma, it be principal in Unix history.
• Bob Bowles came upon and scanned a Unix advert from 1981.
  Peek it now; it be no longer all that mountainous. I came upon one more, and
  Vincent Guyot equipped a Xenix model.
• Karl Kleine of Jena came upon and scanned an
  early Unix license agreement, and likewise two
  tariffs for early 1980s techniques.
  Peek an introduction here.
• The overall
  Seventh Edition Manual is on the market on-line,
  with no longer handiest the man pages but the total papers.
  (The sources for the total device, plus earlier and somelater ones are also accessible; look the
  hyperlinks page.)
• `Portability of C Applications and the UNIX Machine,’
  by me and Steve Johnson is
  accessible in different formats.
  This hyperlink to early portability work collects no longer handiest
  this paper (in diversified formats) but also relatedpapers by Richard Miller, Steve Johnson, Juris Reinfelds,
  Tom London and John Reiser on 32V, moreover to
  later seminal work within Bell Labs
  on a range of machines.
• `A Retrospective,’ from AT&T Bell Laboratories
  Technical Journal, 1978.
  This hyperlink points to a quickdescription of the conditions, with sublinks to renditions of the article.
• `A Lope Enter/Output Machine’, from AT&T Bell Laboratories
  Technical Journal, 1984:
  
  browsable,
  or printable PostScript or
  PDF
• I wrote a pair of papers
  about experiences with Unix on a Cray X/MP.
  The hyperlink is to an HTML page with a miniature bit background; it incorporates
  sublinks to the papers.
• `Interprocess Dialog in the Ninth Edition Unix Machine,’
  with D. L. Presotto, from Tool–Be aware and Abilities,
  19, June 1990.
  
  browsable,
  or printable PostScript or
  PDF
• An aged picture of Ken, me, and a few PDP-11s.
  From the firm archives, with a miniature bit photointerpretation.
• Why Ken needed to form |  :
  some partly enigmatic advice from Doug McIlroy that dates to 1964.
• Some cloth from the Unix

  Tenth Edition Manual, printed in 1990. This became the final Unix manual
  printed by our group. The assortment under the hyperlink is handiest a tiny
  piece of the total two volumes, and incorporates a pair of documents describing
  utilities that survived into Idea 9but are no longer in its salvage manuals, notably pic and tbl.
  Some are factual orderly, treasure pico.

C and its quick ancestors

• BCPL Reference Manual by Martin Richards, dated July 1967.
  The language described here equipped the root for deal of our salvage work and that
  of others. The linked page discusses the conditions, whilstthe info linked under it hang the manual itself.
• Users’ Reference to B, which describes
  the B programming language; it is by Ken Thompson and describes
  the PDP-11 model.
• CSTR #8 also describes
  the B programming language; it is for the GCOS versionon Honeywell tools. It is by Johnson and Kernighan.
• Resurrection of twoprimeval C compilers from 1972-73,
  including source. It is doubtless you’ll more than doubtless no longer give you the option to bring together it with
  nowadays’s compilers, but the hyperlink points to any individual who succeeded in reviving
  one amongst them.
• The model of the
  C Reference Manual
  Postscript (250KB) or
  PDF, (79K)
  that came with Sixth Edition Unix (Could more than doubtless maybe well moreover 1975), in the second quantity entitled
  “Paperwork for Dispute With the Unix Time-sharing Machine”.
  For completeness,
  there are also versions of Kernighan’s
  tutorial on C, in Postscript or
  PDF format.

  There could maybe be a a miniature earlier (January 1974) model of the C manual,
  in the fabricate of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs
  Technical Memorandum, visible here,
  if you doubtlessly can accommodate 1.9MB.

  No updated model of this manual became dispensed with
  most machine readable versions of the seventh Edition,
  because the first edition of the `white e book’
  K&R
  became printed in regards to the identical time. The tutorial became greatlyexpanded into the bulk of the e book,
  and the manual became the e book’s Appendix A.

  Then again, it turns out that the paper copies of the seventh Edition
  manual
  that we printed in the community encompass no longer handiest what
  became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled
  “Most recent Changes to C”, and I retyped this. I haven’tbeen in a position to note down the up to the moment machine-readable
  model (it be imaginable that some tapes were produced that
  integrated it). That is on the market inPostScript or PDF
  format.

  The structure and even many bits of
  wording of the manual survived into K&R I and thence into the ANSI/ISO standardfor the language.

• A Bell Labs CS Tech. Listing (#102) by Steve Johnson and me
  discusses considerations smitten by designing a calling
  sequence for C on diversified machines.
  It is from 1981, and thus pre-ANSI,
  but the considerations have not if fact be told modified. On hand as
  HTML,
  PDF, or
  Postscript.
• `The Pattern of the C Language’, from HOPL II, 1993:
  
  browsable,
  or printable PostScript or
  PDF
  
  Angelo de Oliveira true equipped a translation into
  Portuguese of the paper; his salvage MS Discoverversion is here, whilstthis is Discover’s rendition of
  this into browsable HTML.
• An HTML browsable transcript
  of the controversy I gave at HOPL II, with its slides.
  Or no longer it’s entitled “5 Cramped Languages and How They Grew”
  and it is awfully assorted from the Pattern paper referenced factual above.
• `Variable-dimension Arrays in C,’ a proposal of mine that regarded in
  Journal of C Language Translation, but is no longer the capacity adopted for the
  1999 ISO C identical old:
  
  browsable,
  or printable PostScript or
  PDF.
• The
  The C Programming Language e book has a home page.
  It has acquisition info and the present errata list,
  and veil art from diversified translations.

Attention-grabbing assorted issues: architecture, editors, adventures

• Thompson’s Location Lumber Sport, a graphical
  entertainment that led Ken to search out the PDP-7 that would become principal.
• Dabbling in Cryptography, by which the creator finds himself
  smitten by stronger political forces and better mathematical creativity than is his wont.
• Labscam: a legend from 1989,
  whose protagonists are a demonstrate-biz duo, Idea 9 geeks, and a Nobel laureate.
• Historical notes (and a manual) on
  QED, the ancestor of the Unix
  ed and vi editors.
• VAX over 20+ years, our early
  impression of Digital’s architecture, with an review from Usenet
  of 1988.
• Insider secrets and ways: Values of beeta will give upward push to Dom!
• A Letter from Washington,
  an epic of the skills of receiving the Nationwide Medal of
  Technology.
• A temporary article
  I wrote for ICGA Journal, the publication of the InternationalComputer Games Association, recounting an appreciation of the
  synergy between Ken Thompson’s actions in chess, assorted video games, and
  techniques. It incorporates a comic faked memo by Mike Lesk.
• Some court docket papers
  from the lawsuit introduced by USL in opposition to BSDI,
  then the University of California, in the early 1990s about Unix
  intellectual property.
  These will doubtless be relevant nowadays in look of SCO’s
  recent actions.

Idea 9 and Inferno

• The novel, commence-source edition of the
  Idea 9 device is on the market.
  I contributed handiest a pair of bits and objects to it, but did,
  in plan, signal some paychecks to make your mind up on out it going.
• The device-structuring ideas of Idea 9 were adopted also viathe Inferno device, now dispensed viaVita Nuova.
  Again, this became extra a matter of signing paychecks than
  doing the work, despite the proven fact that I did write about it.

Links I’ve gathered

• Dennis Ritchie appears to be like to hang lives moreover those recorded above.
• Not handiest I, but also UNIX®
  has lives a ways away, and I plan no longer mean Linux or *BSD. Peek some examples.
• Links to sites with Unix, C, and various
  (generally older) historical cloth.

Biography

A temporary biography, in first personinstead of obituary sort.

Bibliography

bibtex format or
html format .

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Fiddled: Could more than doubtless maybe well moreover 2006 to add organization adjustments;
March 2002, to add the HOPL talk hyperlink,
July 2002 to add the C tutorial paper, October 2002
to add the ICGA paper,
January 2003 to add the Portability paper,
April 2003 to add the Kleine cloth, October 2003
for further portability papers.

December 2006 to add novel Alcatel-Lucent emblem.