Dennis Ritchie 1941 - 2011

Ritchie was best known as the creator of the C programming language, and co-founder of the UNIX operating system, and co-author of The C Programming Language, commonly referred to as K&R (in reference to the authors Kernighan and Ritchie). Ritchie worked together with Ken Thompson, the scientist credited with writing the original Unix; one of Ritchie's most important contributions to Unix was its porting to different machines and platforms.

Obviously a vast number of modern technologies depend on the work he and fellow programmers did on Unix and C in the early days of the computer revolution and without him the chances are we wouldnt be where we are, in a technological sense, today.

RIP Dennis.

all you need is one bright spark (Ritchie) and a fire (computing revolution) can start.

and yes without these guys we would still be playing cards under candle light at night