DEVELOPERS

Bjarne Stroustrup
 Bjarne Stroustrup (born June 11, 1950 in Aarhus, Denmark) is a computer scientist and the College of Engineering Chair Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. He is most notable for developing the C++ programming language. A rough English attempt at pronunciation of his name would be "B-yar-ne Strov-stoop".
Stroustrup, in his own words, "invented C++, wrote its early definitions, and produced its first implementation... chose and formulated the design criteria for C++, designed all its major facilities, and was responsible for the processing of extension proposals in the C++ standards committee." Stroustrup also wrote what many consider to be the standard introductory text to the language, The C++ Programming Language, which is now in its third edition. The text has been revised twice to reflect the evolution of the language and the work of the C++ standards committee.
Stroustrup is cand. scient. (the Danish equivalent to a master's degree) in mathematics and computer science (1975) from the University of Aarhus, Denmark, and Ph.D. in computer science (1979) from the University of Cambridge, England. He formerly worked as the head of AT&T Lab's Large-scale Programming Research department, from its creation until late 2002.

Awards & accomplishments
Books
  • The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup - Addison-Wesley Pub Co; 3rd edition (February 15, 2000); ISBN 0201700735
  • The Design and Evolution of C++ by Bjarne Stroustrup - Addison-Wesley Pub Co; 1st edition (March 29, 1994); ISBN 0201543303
  • The Annotated C++ Reference Manual by Margaret A. Ellis & Bjarne Stroustrup - Addison-Wesley Pub Co; (January 1, 1990); ISBN 0201514591
Dennis M. Ritchie

Dennis M. Ritchie is a researcher in the Convergence, Software, and Computer Science Laboratory of Bell Labs / Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, NJ. Before that, he was in the now-dissolved Computing Sciences Research Center, serving for several years as head of its Systems Sciences Research department.
I was born Sept. 9, 1941 in Bronxville, N.Y., and received Bachelor's and advanced degrees from Harvard University, where as an undergraduate I concentrated in Physics and as a graduate student in Applied Mathematics. The subject of my 1968 doctoral thesis was subrecursive hierarchies of functions.
My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat. My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural languages better than functional ones.
I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era.
Soon after, I contributed to the Multics project, then a joint effort of Bell Labs, MIT, and General Electric. I helped with a compiler for the BCPL language on the Multics machine (GE 645) and on the GE 635 under the GECOS system. Also, I wrote the compiler for ALTRAN, a language and system for symbolic calculation.
Subsequently, I aided Ken Thompson in creating the Unix operating system. After Unix had become well established in the Bell System and in a number of educational, government and commercial installations, Steve Johnson and I (helped by Ken) transported the operating system to the Interdata 8/32, thus demonstrating its portability, and laying the groundwork for the widespread growth of Unix: the Seventh Edition version from the Bell Labs research group was the basis for commercial Unix System V and also for the Unix BSD distributions from the University of California at Berkeley. The last important technical contribution I made to Unix was the Streams mechanism for interconnecting devices, protocols, and applications.
Early in the development of Unix, I added data types and new syntax to Thompson's B language, thus producing the new language C. C was the foundation for the portability of Unix, but it has become widely used in other contexts as well; much application and system development for computers of all sizes, from hand-held to supercomputer, uses it. There are unified U.S. and international standards for the language, and it is the basis for Stroustrup's work on its descendant C++.
Today, as a manager of a small group of researchers, I promote exploration of distributed operating systems, languages, and routing/switching hardware. The recent accomplishments of this group include the Plan 9 operating system, which was released in 1995, and the Inferno operating system, announced April 1996.
Awards include: ACM award for the outstanding paper of 1974 in systems and languages; IEEE Emmanuel Piore Award (1982), Bell Laboratories Fellow (1983); Association for Computing Machinery Turing Award (1983); ACM Software Systems Award (1983); C&C Foundation award of NEC (1989); IEEE Hamming Medal (1990). I was elected to the U. S. National Academy of Engineering in 1988. In April 1999 I received the U. S. National Medal of Technology. These were all awarded in conjunction with Ken Thompson.
Ken's virtual coat-tails are long. I'm one of the few, besides Bonnie T., who has seen him wear a real coat (and even black tie) on more than one occasion.

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