Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (1941-2011) 

The extensive media coverage surrounding the death of Steve Jobs overshadowed the recent passing of another major figure in the history of computing.

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie, who died on Oct. 12 – a week after Jobs – created the C programming language, and, along with Ken Thompson, developed the Unix programming language.

For their work, Ritchie and Thompson received the ACM Turing Award in 1983, the IEEE Hamming Medal in 1990, and the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. 

Ritchie's last job was head of the Lucent Technologies System Software research department.  He retired in 2007.

In a letter to the editor in the Oct. 29 issue of New Scientist, Aaron Street from the UK put it well: "While not such a public figure, his impact was no less dramatic. As the creator of the C programming language and joint developer of the Unix operating system, he was a true legend who took computers from the academic realm and helped them become accessible to all."

The Wikipedia entry about Ritchie is available here.