Last week on October 8, 2011, Dennis Richie passed away. Most of the mainstream media failed to report his death — after all he was never quite as flamboyant as another technology darling, Steve Jobs. However, his contributions to the worlds of technology and computer science should certainly place him in the same club.

After all, Dennis Richie developed the computer language C, and he significantly influenced the development of other languages. He also pioneered the operating system, Unix. Both C and Unix now run much of the world’s computer systems.

Dennis Ritchie, and co-developer, Ken Thompson, were awarded the National Medal of Technology in 1999 by President Bill Clinton.

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]