During November of 1999 I sent Dennis Ritchie an email message thanking him for is contributions to computing. I ended my email message asking dmr if he'd send a few words of encouragement to my computing students at Scottsdale Community College.
The GDT::Quote collection contained the following three Dennis Ritchie quotes on 13 October 2011.
To tell the truth, I don't know how Linus and his merry band manage so well -- I couldn't have stood it with C.
-- Dennis Ritchie [ITworld.com interview; "Linus" is Linux creator Linus Torvalds]In looking over this material, I have mixed emotions; so much of this stuff is immature and not well-done, and there is an element of embarrassment about displaying it. But at the same time it does capture two moments in a period of creativeness and may have some historical interest.
-- Dennis Ritchie {from Ritchie's paper Very Early C Compilers and Languages }I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the demigodic party.
-- Dennis Ritchie (01941-02011) {net.unix-wizards posting 12 March 01984; more...} [life]
My MOTD posting on 16 April 1999 included the following.
These are a few of my favorite things...
- coffee -- French Roast (dark)
- programmer -- Dennis Ritchie
- rocker -- Neil Young
- programming language -- C
- food -- LaFonda's salsa and chips
- operating system -- Unix
- usenet group -- comp.lang.c
- college basketball coach -- Bobby Knight
- website -- my own [lots of good stuff on this site]
- place -- Death Valley
- exercise -- hill hiking
- stock -- T (AT&T) and LU (Lucent Technologies) [a tie]
- hobby -- doing nothing
At approximately 7:55am on 13 October 2011 I moved Dennis Ritchie from my Computing::DreamTeam to my Computing::DeadTeam. Ritchie was the second computing guru to make this transition. [Jim Gray, the father of transaction processing, was the first.] {GDT::DreamTeam::Dennis Ritchie--The Father of C [by SCC student Sean Johns on 7 Feb 2000]}
- ACM.org::Reflections on software research [Ritchie's Turing Award Lecture; August 1984 issue of Communications of the ACM
- GDT::ComputingBit::Dennis Ritchie Receives Yet Another Award [15 Nov 2005]
-
GDT::ComputingBit::Economist.com Writes About the Unix Founding Fathers
[26 Jul 2004]
That brings me to Dennis Ritchie. Our collaboration has been a thing of beauty.
-- Ken Thompson
I never meet Dennis Ritchie, but I will be forever grateful for all of his outstanding contributions to our computing world. Ritchie was the consummate computer professional and the world lost a great man when he died.