Dennis Ritchie was born in 1941, 9th of September, when he was doing his PHD in math in Harvard university, he was not satisfied with what he was doing at the time, therefore, he chose an open lecture of computing, which changed his life and the lives of human beings.(Encyclopedia Britannica, n.d.)
On the lecture, Dennis tried to write a piece of code on Univac I which was the first computer designed for business. Although, Dennis was not very good at coding at the time, he insists that this area sounds descent and worthy to be involved in.
Ritchie joined the Bell Labs, where he participates in the development of Multics system. During the development, Dennis and his collogue Ken developed a game program called 'Space Travel'. In order to run the game, Dennis and Ken wrote their first operating system called Unix, but the Digital PDP-7 which was the computer that they are using was too powerless to run the system.(CHM, 2022)
In 1971, Dennis and Ken finally got a PDP-11/24 which is powerful enough to run the system and their game 'Space Travel'.(History of computinG, n.d.)
Two years after the success of their gaming system, Dennis decide to create a brand-new programming language based on the BCPL (Basic Combined Programming Language) which was the main stream language of that time. That was the moment when C was born, and the world stepped into a new era.
The reason why C has made a huge change to the world and our lives is that, the operating systems that we are using now (windows, Linux and IOS) are based on C. And as a gamer, I think C is also a the game changer in game industry, because most of famous and powerful game engines are written in C.
As the first widely used programming language, C has created lots of useful software. Although some software now have abandoned C and used other languages instead, we still cannot deny the fact that C made all of these possible. Such contribution made by Dennis M. Ritchie made him one of the most important figures in the entire history of mankind.
Reference:
Encyclopedia Britannica. (n.d.). Dennis M. Ritchie | Biography & Facts. [online] Available at:https://www.britannica.com/biography/Dennis-M-Ritchie.
CHM. (2022). Dennis Ritchie - CHM. [online] Available at: https://computerhistory.org/profile/dennis-ritchie/.
History of computinG. (n.d.). Dennis M. Ritchie. [online] Available at: http://comp1220uwihistoryofcomputers.weebly.com/dennis-m-ritchie.html.