Dennis M. Ritchie

Location

Dennis Ritchie

Bell Labs, Rm 2C-517

600 Mountain Ave.

Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636, USA

Bell Labs, Rm 2C-517 600 Mountain Ave. Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636, USA dmr@bell-labs.com

+1 908-582-3770 (office), +1 908-582-5857 (fax)

In Memoriam

As Dennis's siblings, Lynn, John, and Bill Ritchie--on behalf of the entire Ritchie family--we wanted to convey to all of you how deeply moved, astonished, and appreciative we are of the loving tributes to Dennis that we have been reading. We can confirm what we keep hearing again and again:

Dennis was an unfailingly kind, sweet, unassuming, and generous brother--and of course a complete geek. He had a hilariously dry sense of humor, and a keen appreciation for life's absurdities--though his world view was entirely devoid of cynicism or mean-spiritedness.

We are terribly sad to have lost him, but touched beyond words to realize what a mark he made on the world, and how well his gentle personality--beyond his accomplishments--seems to be understood.

Lynn, John, and Bill Ritchie



History



When I joined in 1967, Bell Labs was a corporation jointly owned by American Telephone and Telegraph Company and its subsidiary Western Electric. Its official name was Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated.



Soon after, Ken Thompson, together with me and others, first started work on Unix. Also soon after, AT&T, which still owned most of the Bell System, updated its logo (I doubt the events were related). The new logo just updated the image; corporate structure remained the same. The material published by us during the period up to 1984 used this Bell logo and the name "Bell Laboratories."



In 1984, AT&T, under a negotiated consent decree, divested the local telephone companies it had owned and in the process gave up the Bell logo and the Bell name except in connection with Bell Laboratories. Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. was dissolved as a corporation and became an integrated unit of AT&T. We lost the Wehrmacht helmet and gained the Deathstar, and now identified ourselves as working at "AT&T Bell Laboratories."



In 1996, AT&T (this time voluntarily) spun off its systems and technology organizations into Lucent Technologies, while AT&T kept the services business. Bell Labs stayed mostly with Lucent, though some of our colleagues helped form a new AT&T labs, much as some of us went to Bellcore in 1984. The new corporate logo usually includes the line "Bell Labs Innovations."







Lucent and Alcatel merged as of Dec 1, 2006. Another new name and logo! and still the same office.

Bell Labs has remained a remarkably good place to do work that has enduring impact over the long run, no matter what the company, the courts, the PR types or upper management decide should be our name and logo on a given day or year.

Some material

Unix papers and writings, approximately chronological

C and its immediate ancestors

BCPL Reference Manual by Martin Richards, dated July 1967. The language described here supplied the basis for much of our own work and that of others. The linked page discusses the circumstances, while the files linked under it have the manual itself.

Users' Reference to B, which describes the B programming language; it is by Ken Thompson and describes the PDP-11 version.

CSTR #8 also describes the B programming language; it is for the GCOS version on Honeywell equipment. It is by Johnson and Kernighan.

Resurrection of two primeval C compilers from 1972-73, including source. You won't be able to compile it with today's compilers, but the link points to someone who succeeded in reviving one of them.

The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System''. For completeness, there are also versions of Kernighan's tutorial on C, in Postscript or PDF format. There is also a slightly earlier (January 1974) version of the C manual, in the form of an uninterpreted PDF scan of a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum, visible here, if you can accommodate 1.9MB. No updated version of this manual was distributed with most machine readable versions of the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time. The tutorial was greatly expanded into the bulk of the book, and the manual became the book's Appendix A. However, it turns out that the paper copies of the 7th Edition manual that we printed locally include not only what became Appendix A of K&R 1, but also a page entitled "Recent Changes to C", and I retyped this. I haven't been able to track down the contemporary machine-readable version (it's possible that some tapes were produced that included it). This is available in PostScript 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 standard for the language.

A Bell Labs CS Tech. Report (#102) by Steve Johnson and me discusses issues involved in designing a calling sequence for C on various machines. It is from 1981, and thus pre-ANSI, but the issues haven't really changed. Available as HTML, PDF, or Postscript.

`The Development of the C Language', from HOPL II, 1993:

browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF

Angelo de Oliveira kindly supplied a translation into Portuguese of the paper; his own MS Word version is here, while this is Word's rendition of this into browsable HTML.

browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF Angelo de Oliveira kindly supplied a translation into Portuguese of the paper; his own MS Word version is here, while this is Word's rendition of this into browsable HTML. An HTML browsable transcript of the talk I gave at HOPL II, with its slides. It's entitled "Five Little Languages and How They Grew" and it is quite different from the Development paper referenced just above.

`Variable-size Arrays in C,' a proposal of mine that appeared in Journal of C Language Translation, but is not the approach adopted for the 1999 ISO C standard:

browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF.

browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF. The The C Programming Language book has a home page. It has acquisition information and the current errata list, and cover art from various translations.

Interesting other things: architecture, editors, adventures

Plan 9 and Inferno

The new, open-source edition of the Plan 9 system is available. I contributed only a few bits and pieces to it, but did, in effect, sign some paychecks to keep it going.

The system-structuring ideas of Plan 9 were adopted also by the Inferno system, now distributed by Vita Nuova. Again, this was more a matter of signing paychecks than doing the work, though I did write about it.

Links I've gathered

Biography

Bibliography