Dennis M. Ritchie co-developed Unix with Ken Thompson and contributed the C programming language used to express much of the system. Their original paper connects this implementation choice with a practical system offering a hierarchical file system and composable process input and output.[ref]
The UNIX Time-Sharing System by Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson. §1, C language and system overview; implementation discussion
The scientific interest is the relation between abstraction and machine control: a language implementation must preserve operations on storage, arithmetic and interfaces while enabling a larger system to be written coherently. Ritchie's preserved Bell Labs homepage records the early Unix collaboration and identifies his historical work.[ref]
Portrait of Dennis M. Ritchie
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