Dennis M. Ritchie

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Dennis M. Ritchie

American software engineer who won the Alan M. Turing Award for developing, with Kenneth Thompson, the Unix operating system in 1969. Widely regarded as one of the fastest and the most stable operating systems available, Unix forms the basis for a very high percentage of scientific and business computer networks. It also serves as the foundation for the increasingly popular Linux operating system. In addition to his work on Unix, Ritchie played a major role in developing the C programming language.