Re: Dennis Ritchie at UPenn

[Walt Mankowski <waltman@pobox.com>]

On Wed, Oct 29, 2003 at 10:58:17AM -0500, Laura Kolker wrote:
> 
> I thought maybe some of you might be interested in the following:
> =================================================================
> Please mark your calendars for the Pender Award Lecture on Wednesday, 
> November 12.
> 
> This year's award recipients are Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson, 
> developers of the UNIX operating system and the C programming 
> language.
> 
> Dennis Ritchie will present the lecture, which will be entitled "UNIX 
> and Beyond:  Themes of Operating Systems Research at Bell Labs" at 
> 4:30 p.m. in the Wu-Chen Auditorium.  A reception will follow in the 
> Levine Lobby.

Here's some more detail about tomorrow's lecture:

THE HAROLD PENDER LECTURE
by Dennis M. Ritchie


UNIX and Beyond: Themes of Operating Systems Research at Bell Labs"

Wednesday, November 12
4:30 p.m.
Wu & Chen Auditorium, Levine Hall
Reception to follow, Levine Hall Lobby

The 2003 Harold Pender Award is presented to Dennis M. Ritchie and
Kenneth L. Thompson for their pioneering accomplishments in developing
the UNIX operating system and C programming language which led to
significant advances in computer technology.

The Harold Pender Award is given by the Faculty of the Moore School to
outstanding members of the engineering profession who have achieved
distinction by significant contributions to society.

---------------------
Lecture Abstract:
Over the years since 1969, the work in computer operating systems
within Bell Labs research has shown a consistency of approach even as
it has evolved. This talk will discuss the main ideas that that we
have followed over the years, some of the historical development, and
some of their current applications.

The architectural idea that we have followed most faithfully is to
represent system resources as files in a hierarchical naming scheme,
and which are accessed by read-write operations. This was present even
in very early UNIX systems using "device files" and with "pipes" for
connecting programs. It is considerably generalized in the more recent
Plan 9 and Inferno systems.

Our technological approach emphasizes portability: creating systems
that can be moved across various hardware platforms, and even imported
into other operating systems. This means not only writing in a
relatively machine-independent language, but also choosing portable
data presentation formats.

The sociological approach turns on openness: although the actual code
for UNIX has been traditionally proprietary, the standards for its
interface have always been open, as have the languages we have
developed in the UNIX context, like C, C++, awk, and many others. More
recent developments have made our own work more open and available as
understood in today's world.

The influence of these approaches has been felt far outside Bell Labs,
but Lucent's own products have taken advantage of our long-term
research by using our software directly.

----------------
Dennis Ritchie bio:
Dennis M. Ritchie works in the Computing Science Research Center of
Bell Labs, the R&D arm of Lucent Technologies. He received his
Bachelor's and advanced degrees from Harvard University, where as an
undergraduate he concentrated in Physics and as a graduate student in
Applied Mathematics.

Ritchie joined Bell Laboratories in 1967, where he contributed to the
Multics project, at that time a joint effort of Bell Laboratories,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and General Electric.
Subsequently, he aided Ken Thompson in creating the UNIX® operating
system. After UNIX had become established in the Bell System and in a
number of educational, government and commercial installations,
Ritchie and Steven C. Johnson transported the operating system to
another hardware architecture, thus demonstrating its portability, and
laying the groundwork for the widespread growth of the UNIX system.

Early in the development of Unix, Ritchie added data types and new
syntax to Thompson's B language, thus producing the new language
C. This language is the foundation for the portability of UNIX, and it
has become widely used in other contexts as well. The C language is
now the subject of ANSI and ISO standards. The first edition of his
book on C, co-authored with Brian Kernighan, was the foundation for
the first C standard; the second edition describes the 1989 standard.

Ritchie, with Thompson, has received several awards from national and
international organizations, including the U.S. Medal of Technology in
1999. He was elected to the U. S. National Academy of Engineering in
1988.

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