American computer scientist, co-creator of the Unix operating system
For other people named Ken Thompson, see Ken Thompson (disambiguation).
Ken Thompson
Brian Kernighan (left) and Ken Thompson (right) in 2019
Born
Kenneth Lane Thompson
(1943-02-04) February 4, 1943 (age 81)
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Nationality
American
Alma mater
University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1965; M.S., 1966)
Known for
Multics
Unix
B (programming language)
Belle (chess machine)
UTF-8
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Inferno (operating system)
grep
Endgame tablebase
Go
Awards
IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1982)[1]
Turing Award (1983)
Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1985)[2]
IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (1990)
Computer Pioneer Award (1994)
National Medal of Technology (1998)
Tsutomu Kanai Award (1999)
Harold Pender Award (2003)
Japan Prize (2011)
Scientific career
Fields
Computer science
Institutions
Bell Labs
Entrisphere, Inc
Google
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language.
Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle. He won the Turing Award in 1983 with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie.
^"IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award Recipients" (PDF). IEEE. Archived from the original (PDF) on Nov 24, 2010. Retrieved Mar 20, 2021.
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Retrieved Jul 27, 2023. "Dr. KenThompson". National Academy of Engineering. Archived from the original on Oct 21, 2021. Thompson, Ken (1984). "Reflections on...
The Thompson shell was the first Unix shell, introduced in the first version of Unix in 1971, and was written by KenThompson. It was a simple command...
whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by KenThompson, Dennis Ritchie, and others. Initially intended for use inside the Bell...
Taskmaster in Taskmaster. He also starred as Dan Davies in Man Down and KenThompson in Cuckoo. He currently writes and stars as Paul "Wicky" Wickstead in...
Kenneth, or KenThompson, or Kenny Thompson, or Kennedy Thompson, or Kenan Thompson may refer to: Kenneth Thompson (bishop) (died 1975), Bishop of Sherwood...
and, with long-time colleague KenThompson, the Unix operating system and B programming language. Ritchie and Thompson were awarded the Turing Award from...
private utility written by KenThompson to search files for certain patterns. Doug McIlroy, unaware of its existence, asked Thompson to write such a program...
of the project. Their last researchers to leave Multics – among them KenThompson, Dennis Ritchie, Doug McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna – decided to redo the...
manufactured one atomic layer at a time. In 1969, Dennis Ritchie and KenThompson created the computer operating system UNIX for the support of telecommunication...
The Unix philosophy, originated by KenThompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It...
The Practice of Programming and The Unix Programming Environment. With KenThompson, he is the co-creator of UTF-8 character encoding. While at Bell Labs...
those, etc. KenThompson was a pioneer in this area. The results of the computer analysis sometimes surprised people. In 1977 Thompson's Belle chess machine...
early systems programming language, was developed by Dennis Ritchie and KenThompson at Bell Labs between 1969 and 1973. Smalltalk (mid-1970s) provided a...
one of the first parts of the system to be designed and implemented by KenThompson in the first experimental version of Unix, dated 1969. As in other operating...
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