Ken thompson

Kenneth Lane Thompson (New Orleans, Louisiana, February 4, 1943), better known as Ken Thompson, is a pioneer in computer science. His work with the B programming language and the UNIX operating system and Plan 9 for Bell Laboratories. Thompson is credited, along with Dennis Ritchie, with the creation of UNIX.

Biography

In 1965 he graduated in science and in 1966 he obtained a master's degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California.

Ken Thompson (left) and Dennis Ritchie

In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the B programming language, which he named after his wife, Bonnie, (also said to have been probably a contraction of "BCPL"), which would be the precursor of C. Both Thompson and Ritchie abandoned the development of Multics due to its increasing complexity, and in 1969 they created the UNIX operating system.

Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the QED (Quick Editor) text editor, which included regular expressions for searching the text. QED and a more modern editor ed (the default editor on Unix) contributed to the development of regular expressions. These became important in word processors. Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson's notation.

He also worked on the development of the PDP-11 and on the introduction of pipes into operating systems.

On September 2, 1992, he and Rob Pike invented the UTF-8 character code, but it was not officially introduced until January 1993 at a conference in San Diego.

Together with Joseph Condon, he created the hardware and software for Belle, a chess computer. Later, with the help of expert chess player John Roycroft, Thompson distributed his early results on CD-ROM.

Thompson's programming style has greatly influenced other programmers.

In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs to work at Entrisphere where he stayed until 2006. He currently works for Google developing the Go language.

Awards

• Turing Prize (1983), together with Dennis Ritchie. By their contributions to the development of operating systems in general and the creation of UNIX in particular.
• United States National Medal of Technology (1999).
• Tsutomu Kanai Award (1999) from IEEE.