Dennis M. Ritchie

Location

• Dennis Ritchie
  Bell Labs, Rm 2C-517
  600 Mountain Ave.
  Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636, USA
• dmr@bell-labs.com
• +1 908-582-3770 (office), +1 908-582-5857 (fax)

History

When I joined in 1967, Bell Labs was a corporation jointly owned by American Telephone and Telegraph Company and its subsidiary Western Electric. Its official name was Bell Telephone Laboratories, Incorporated.

Soon after, Ken Thompson, together with me and others, first started work on Unix. Also soon after, AT&T, which still owned most of the Bell System, updated its logo (I doubt the events were related). The new logo just updated the image; corporate structure remained the same. The material published by us during the period up to 1984 used this Bell logo and the name "Bell Laboratories."

In 1984, AT&T, under a negotiated consent decree, divested the local telephone companies it had owned and in the process gave up the Bell logo and the Bell name except in connection with Bell Laboratories. Bell Telephone Laboratories Inc. was dissolved as a corporation and became an integrated unit of AT&T. We lost the Wehrmacht helmet and gained the Deathstar, and now identified ourselves as working at "AT&T Bell Laboratories."

In 1996, AT&T (this time voluntarily) spun off its systems and technology organizations into Lucent Technologies, while AT&T kept the services business. Bell Labs stayed mostly with Lucent, though some of our colleagues helped form a new AT&T labs, much as some of us went to Bellcore in 1984. The new corporate logo usually includes the line "Bell Labs Innovations."

Bell Labs remains a remarkably good place to do work that has enduring impact over the long run, no matter what the company, the courts, and PR types decide should be our name and logo on a given day or year.

Some material

Unix papers and writings, approximately chronological

• Unix Programmer's Manual, First Edition (1971) Page scan or Postscript (via OCR) of life before pipes or grep were invented.

• Notes for a Unix talk circa 1972

• `The Unix Time-sharing System,' the 1978 BSTJ update of the 1974 C. ACM article by me and Ken Thompson originally describing Unix:
  browsable, or PostScript or PDF.

• `The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System,' an account of developments during 1968-1973.
  browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF

• A Memo from 1976 that proposes buying a machine to which to port Unix, and the kinds of changes that would be needed in C to make this possible. Although the memo itself is rather pro forma, it's important in Unix history.

• Bob Bowles found and scanned a Unix ad from 1981. See it now; it's not all that big.

• The entire Seventh Edition Manual is available on-line, with not only the man pages but all the papers. (The sources for the entire system, plus earlier and some later ones are also available; see the links page.)

• `A Retrospective,' from AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, 1978. This link points to a short description of the circumstances, with sublinks to renditions of the article.

• `A Stream Input/Output System', from AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, 1984:
  browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF

• I wrote a couple of papers about experiences with Unix on a Cray X/MP. The link is to an HTML page with a little background; it contains sublinks to the papers.

• `Interprocess Communication in the Ninth Edition Unix System,' with D. L. Presotto, from Software--Practice and Experience, 19, June 1990.
  browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF

• An old picture of Ken, me, and some PDP-11s. From the company archives, with a little photointerpretation.

• Why Ken had to invent |  : some partially enigmatic advice from Doug McIlroy that dates to 1964.

• Some material from the Unix Tenth Edition Manual, published in 1990. This was the last Unix manual published by our group. The collection under the link is only a small part of the whole two volumes, and contains a few documents describing utilities that survived into Plan 9 but are not in its own manuals, notably pic and tbl. Some are just neat, like pico.

C and its immediate ancestors

• BCPL Reference Manual by Martin Richards, dated July 1967. The language described here supplied the basis for much of our own work and that of others. The linked page discusses the circumstances, while the files linked under it have the manual itself.

• Users' Reference to B, which describes the B programming language; it is by Ken Thompson and describes the PDP-11 version.

• CSTR #8 also describes the B programming language; it is for the GCOS version on Honeywell equipment. It is by Johnson and Kernighan.

• Resurrection of two primeval C compilers from 1972-73, including source. You won't be able to compile it with today's compilers, but the link points to someone who succeeded in reviving one of them.

• The version of the C Reference Manual Postscript (250KB) or PDF, (79K) that came with 6th Edition Unix (May 1975), in the second volume entitled ``Documents for Use With the Unix Time-sharing System''.

  No updated version of this manual was distributed with the 7th Edition, since the first edition of the `white book' K&R was published about the same time, and the manual became the book's Appendix A. The structure and even many bits of wording survived into K&R I and thence into the ANSI/ISO standard for the language.

• `The Development of the C Language', from HOPL II, 1993:
  browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF
  Angelo de Oliveira kindly supplied a translation into Portuguese of the paper; his own MS Word version is here, while this is Word's rendition of this into browsable HTML.

• An HTML browsable transcript of the talk I gave at HOPL II, with its slides. It's entitled "Five Little Languages and How They Grew" and it is quite different from the Development paper referenced just above.

• `Variable-size Arrays in C,' a proposal of mine that appeared in Journal of C Language Translation, but is not the approach adopted for the 1999 ISO C standard:
  browsable, or printable PostScript or PDF.

• The The C Programming Language book has a home page. It has acquisition information and the current errata list, and cover art from various translations.

Interesting other things: architecture, editors, adventures

• Thompson's Space Travel Game, a graphical entertainment that led Ken to find the PDP-7 that would become important.

• Dabbling in Cryptography, in which the author finds himself involved in stronger political forces and higher mathematical creativity than is his wont.

• Labscam: a story from 1989, whose protagonists are a show-biz duo, Plan 9 geeks, and a Nobel laureate.

• Historical notes (and a manual) on QED, the ancestor of the Unix ed and vi editors.

• VAX over 20+ years, our early impression of Digital's architecture, with an assessment from Usenet of 1988.

• Insider secrets: Values of beeta will give rise to Dom!

• A Letter from Washington, an account of the experience of receiving the National Medal of Technology.

Plan 9 and Inferno

• The new, open-source edition of the Plan 9 system is available. I contributed only a few bits and pieces to it, but did, in effect, sign some paychecks to keep it going.

• The system-structuring ideas of Plan 9 were adopted also by the Inferno system, now distributed by Vita Nuova. Again, this was more a matter of signing paychecks than doing the work, though I did write about it.

Links I've gathered

• Dennis Ritchie seems to have lives besides those recorded above.

• Not only I, but also UNIX® has lives far away, and I don't mean Linux or *BSD. See some examples.

• Links to sites with Unix, C, and other (generally older) historical material.

Biography

Bibliography