Dennis Ritchie,  co-inventor, with Brian W. Kernighan, of the C programming language, and co-author of the book of that name, and co-inventor, with Ken Thompson, of  the Unix operating system, died at his home in Berkeley Heights, NJ. He was 70.

He spent his professional career at Bell Labs, an iconic institution which boasted a patent a day for years, if not decades, and includes among its inventions both the transistor and the photovoltaic cell.

Like Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie was an iconic pioneer who changed the world significantly and dramatically. And like Steve Jobs, Dennis Ritchie’s work influences modern computers, from the servers in network operations centers to  desktop,  laptops, tablets, and phones.

One of the beauties of Unix is that it was itself written largely in C, so it was easy to port from one line of computer, say the DEC PDP 9 to the next, say the DEC PDP 11, and from the Mac built on the Power PC to the Intel X-86. The Unix operating system migrated from telephone systems and switches to workstations from HP, IBM, & Sun, to the NeXT machines and then the Mac.

Back in the late ’80’s and ‘early to mid-’90’s, when I worked as a programmer and DBA on Unix systems, most of the people who used workstations running HPUX, AIX, SunOS and Solaris knew they were working on Unix computers, and were familiar with C, C with Classes, C++, etc. But I would be astounded if today more than 0.01% of the current population of MAC, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android users know that they are working on a Unix C / C++ (OS X, iOS) or Linux C/C++  (Android) device. But that’s part of the elegance of Unix.

There’s another elegance to all this. Ritchie worked on the development of an operating environment and software development system which migrated from telephone company labs and network operations centers to the phones that many of us carry in our pockets and on our belts.

Who knew when he wrote “Hello world” that he was introducing us to a new virtual world that was saying hello?