Dennis M. Ritchie

Ritchie came to Bell Labs in 1967 from Harvard University, where he had completed undergraduate work in physics and a doctorate in applied mathematics. Soon, he began helping Ken Thompson create Unix for minicomputers. He later transported Unix to the Interdata 8/32. The foundation for this portability was a general-purpose language created in 1972 by Ritchie, who added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language and renamed it C. In 1978, Ritchie co-authored The C Programming Language with Brian Kernighan, introducing this highly efficient language to the world. Since then, C has become the most widely used language in computers of all sizes. The American National Standards Institute eventually established an ANSI standard for C.