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Memorial Tributes Volume 20 (2016) / Chapter Skim
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DENNIS M. RITCHIE
Pages 246-249

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From page 247...
... Explaining his career path, he once said, "My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat. My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones." Dennis joined Bell Labs in 1967 as a member of the technical staff in what soon became the Computing Science Research Center.
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From page 248...
... The C programming language dates from very early in the 1970s. It was based on Dennis's experience with high-level languages for Multics implementation, but much reduced in size because computers of the time had very limited capacity; there simply was not enough memory or processing power to support a complicated compiler for a complicated language.
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From page 249...
... . After successfully avoiding any management role for many years, Dennis finally yielded and became head of the Software Systems Department at Bell Labs, where he was responsible for the group of researchers who were building the Plan 9 operating system, an attempt to reclaim the simplicity of the original Unix while unifying some of its disparate mechanisms.
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