For most Penn students, "C" is nothing more than a mediocre grade and Unix is something computer-techies talk about on TV.
But for students and faculty in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, C is one of the core programming languages and Unix is a crucial pioneer in the world of computer operating systems.
Yesterday, Penn celebrated the fathers of C and Unix as the Engineering School presented Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson with what Engineering Dean Eduardo Glandt called the school's highest honor -- the Harold Pender Award.
Established in 1972 and named for the Moore School of Electrical Engineering's first dean, the annual award honors an engineer for his or her contributions to society.
Glandt said that Ritchie and Thompson fit the bill because they were pioneers at Bell Laboratories, an engineering research hub in New Jersey, in developing Unix, which is now a widely used operating system.
"That was a revolutionary moment," Glandt said.
In the process of designing Unix, Ritchie adapted Thompson's B program language into the widely used C language.
While Thompson was unable to come to Penn to receive his award, Ritchie spent yesterday meeting with faculty and students, and then speaking in the afternoon before a formal dinner.
At a lunch with about a dozen students, Ritchie explained the context of his early work.
"At the time in the '70s when the work was being done, there really was not a lot of alternatives," he said, adding that most of the other options were cumbersome, making a system like Unix a real necessity.
"We got positive feedback quite soon but the intent... was to do things that made our own lives better," Ritchie said.
Students expressed awe at how Unix and C have continued to remain relevant.
"The stuff that he invented is one of the aspects of our education that has endured over the past 25 years," Engineering senior Ramapriyan Pratiwadi said.
Later, Ritchie spoke to a packed crowd in the 150-seat Levine Hall Auditorium, with students overflowing into the hallways outside.
Giving a brief history of Unix, Ritchie focused on his more recent operating system projects, including Inferno and Plan 9.
Talking about one system designed for international use, Ritchie showed how the program could generate several different languages.
Presenting a slide with text in Greek, Japanese and Russian, Ritchie added humor to a mostly technical discussion, saying, "You probably can't read it for several reasons."
All joking aside, everyone was eager to hear Ritchie speak.
"Plan 9 and Inferno are today potentially what Unix was in its incipient stages," Penn Liniac Project Manager Dan Widyono said, adding that seeing a computer science legend "in the flesh" was particularly exciting.
After his lecture, about 100 of Ritchie's cult followers and Engineering professors gathered for a dinner and ceremony at the University Museum, where Ritchie was presented with a certificate and an "Eniac-on-a-Chip," in honor of the groundbreaking Eniac computer invented at Penn.
Almost speechless, Ritchie's beaming smile filled the room.
"This is really a delightful event for me, and I'm very honored."
