Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie died on October 8, 2011 at the age of 70 after a prolonged illness (prostate cancer and heart disease). Dennis Ritchie was born September 9, 1941 in Bronxville, New York. He was the principal designer of the C programming language and co-developer of the Unix operating system. whose variants — most notably Linux and OS X.
Dennis Ritchie