Dennis Ritchie

Co-inventor of UNIX (with Ken Thompson) at Bell Labs, and later co-creator of the C programming language.

Matters to this vault so far as the primary source for Bell Labs' own institutional relationship to Multics: his 1979 history of UNIX's origins dates the Labs' "slow, though clearly inevitable, withdrawal" from the Multics project to 1968-1969, which is the evidence that the Bell-Labs/Honeywell/Multics world Thompson and Roger Schell both passed through predates, and is causally separate from, the 1974 Karger & Schell security report Thompson later cited — see claim-shared-multics-environment-predates-karger-schell-1974-report-not-credit-channel.

References

• claim-shared-multics-environment-predates-karger-schell-1974-report-not-credit-channel
• Captures: 2026-10-29-ken-thompsons-1984-reflections-on-trusting-trust-credits