---
title: Dennis Ritchie's Typographical Mystery
description: Today I learned that Dennis Ritchie's Ph.D. thesis was never accepted and that his son created a game company.
slug: dennis-ritchie-typographical-mystery
<!--- authors:
  - name: David Windham
    title: Something Else
    url: https://davidawindham.com
    image_url: https://davidawindham.com/wp-content/themes/daw/img/opengraph_image.jpg -->
tags: [games,people]
image: https://davidawindham.com/wp-content/themes/daw/img/opengraph_image.jpg
hide_table_of_contents: false
---

Today I learned that Dennis Ritchies Ph.D. thesis was never accepted and that his son created a game company called Binary Arts <sub>1,2</sub>.  The reason this was important to me is because I use Unix daily and had a collection of puzzles which included Spin-Out from Bill Ritchie's company.

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Dennis Ritchie was the computer scientist who created the C programming language and the Unix operating system<sub>3</sub>. These two are the underpinnings of a vast majority of what computers today. I've been tinkering with a little side project based on puzzles that encourages curiosity in learning since I credit this quality for my own success. I'll start a page for that project over at [/notes/work/projects/games](/notes/work/projects/game)


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1. How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery - https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/dmr/doceng22.pdf
2. Bill Ritchie - https://www.thinkfun.com/about-us/meet-the-team/
3. Dennis Ritchie - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie