The C programming language creator and co-developer of the Unix operating system Dennis Ritchie died at home on October 8 after an extended illness, at the age of 70. Former colleague Rob Pike first publicly announced the death, which Alcatel-Lucent then confirmed.

Ritchie, born in Bronxville, New York on September 9, 1941, joined Bell Labs in 1967. There, with Ken Thompson, he helped develop Unix, an operating system on which are based many modern systems like Linux and Mac OS X. Unix provided the infrastructure that led the creation of the Internet. Between 1969 and 1973 he developed the C, one of the most used programming languages, that influenced many languages like C++, Java, and PHP.

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