BANGALORE, INDIA: Designer and developer of the 'C' programming language, and co-creator of Unix operating system, Dennis Ritchie passed away last weekend at the age of 70 after prolonged illness.

Born in Bronxville, New York in September 1941, Ritchie graduated from Harvard with degrees in mathematics and physics before taking up an assignment with Bell Labs in 1968.

The news was announced by his good personal friend Rob Pike, a former colleague of Ritchie's on Google Plus social networking site.

According to reports, Ritchie was getting treated for prostate cancer and heart disease.

Ritchie worked with ken Thompson, the scientist behind writing original source code for Unix in 1971. Teaming-up with Thompson, Ritchie created the C programming language in 1973, which is widely used today by the developer community in development of applications, operating systems and has got its contributions in embedded system development.

It may be noted that after the initial launch of C programming language, several extension versions of programming language have emerged which includes C++, C# and Objective C.

In 1983, Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing Award for their contributions to development of Unix operating system and in 1988, both were awarded by then President Bill Clinton with the National Medal for their contribution to development of C and co-developing Unix.

Ritchie has authored "The C Programming Language", a well-known programming book, aimed at developers and spent the majority of his professional career working at Bell Labs.