(WIRED) -- The tributes to Dennis Ritchie won't match the river of praise that spilled out over the web after the death of Steve Jobs. But they should. And then some. "When Steve Jobs died last week, there was a huge outcry, and that was very moving and justified. But Dennis had a bigger effect, and the public doesn't even know who he is," says Rob Pike, the programming legend and current Googler who spent 20 years working across the hall from Ritchie at the famed Bell Labs. On Wednesday evening, with a post to Google+, Pike announced that Ritchie had died at his home in New Jersey over the weekend after a long illness, and though the response from hardcore techies was immense, the collective eulogy from the web at large doesn't quite do justice to Ritchie's sweeping influence on the modern world.
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Dennis Ritchie is the father of the C programming language
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Ritchie used C to build UNIX, the OS that so much is built on
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"We're all standing on Dennis' shoulders," expert says
"They built @placeholder to write a program," says Pike, who would join Bell Labs 10 years later.