Computer scientist Dennis Ritchie dies

Dennis Ritchie, a computer scientist who changed modern technology by writing an elegantly simple computer programming language, was found dead at his home in Murray Hill, N.J., his former colleague Rob Pike said. He was 70.

Ritchie's body was discovered last weekend. A cause of death was not immediately available.

As the news of his death spread throughout the computer science world, historians and computer enthusiasts compared the bearded, introverted Ritchie to media-savvy Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died Oct. 5.

"It's sort of 'apples' and oranges," said Paul Ceruzzi, a Smithsonian historian. "Ritchie was under the radar. His name was not a household name at all, but . . . if you had a microscope and could look in a computer, you'd see his work everywhere."

Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie was born Sept. 9, 1941, in Bronxville, to a scientific family. His father, Alistair Ritchie, worked at Bell Laboratories and co-wrote a book on switching circuits.

The younger Ritchie attended Harvard, where he earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1963 and a doctorate in applied mathematics in 1968. Like his father, Ritchie worked at Bell Laboratories for four decades, from his time as a Harvard doctoral student until his retirement in 2007. He was the inventor of the programming language known as C and co-inventor of the operating system Unix, another innovation that came from Bell Labs in the late 1960s and early '70s.

When Ritchie went to Bell, computer programming language was arcane and impenetrable for many computer gurus of the era. As a young scientist, Ritchie went to work on a language that was sophisticated yet simple.

He named his creation C because programming language that came before it was called B.

C language was the foundation for Unix, the operating system Ritchie helped develop with Bell colleague Kenneth Thompson. Microsoft Windows-based personal computers and many Apple products run on its descendants. It is the ancestor of "most of the infrastructure of our wired society," Ceruzzi said.