In a place like here (hacker news), the passing of Ritchie is obviously a very big deal. But I'm not surprised that my mom (for example) doesn't know who Ritchie was, regardless of how many devices and applications she uses written and designed in C. Hell, I'm not even sure every software dev out there knows the history of C, to be perfectly honest. But that doesn't take anything away from the amazing things Ritchie did for technology and mankind.