Unix originators Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson of AT&T Co’s Bell Labs, now run as part of Lucent Technologies Inc, are to receive the US National Medal of Technology, President Clinton announced on Tuesday. The award will be presented next year at the White House. Thomson and Ritchie are credited with the invention of the Unix operating system and the C programming language, which between them began the whole movement towards portable open systems and code. Most commercial software is still written in C or C++, and Java is derived from C++. Since then they have worked on Lucent’s Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems, and contributed to the development of the PathStar Access Server, a carrier-grade real-time voice/data access server for packet voice and data services over IP. It’s due to become generally available in March 1999.
