---
title: "Dennis Ritchie"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Dennis Ritchie"
aliases: ["Dennis M. Ritchie","dmr"]
first_seen: "2026-10-29T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["UNIX","Ken Thompson","Multics","Bell Labs","history of computing"]
seek_code_commit: "d40ee39"
---


Co-inventor of UNIX (with [[entity-ken-thompson|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
[[entity-roger-schell|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