MURRAY HILL, N.J., Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Dennis Ritchie, creator of the C computer programming language and co-creator of the Unix operating system, has died at 70, officials said.
Ritchie's death was confirmed Thursday by Bell Labs, where he had worked for many years until his retirement in 2007, ZDNet UK reported.
Ritchie was born in Bronxville, N.Y., and grew up in New Jersey. He attended Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined the Bell labs, now Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, in 1967.
At Bell Labs, Ritchie and his collaborator Kenneth Thompson began work on the operating system that became Unix, announced in 1973.
In the mid-1970s there was great variation in computer hardware design and software programmers were forced to either limit their programs to running on one particular platform or spend a great deal of time and energy recreating their work for each new device.
To overcome that hurdle, Ritchie designed a computer language, C, that could be quickly and easily moved between different hardware, so programs written in C would run with little or no modification on any computer that could itself run C.
