Ken Thompson is an American computer scientist born in 1943. Together with his friend Dennis Ritchie, he developed the B programming language and the Unix operating system at Bell Laboratories.
His full name is Kenneth Lane Thompson. He was born on February 4, 1943, in America. He is known for the development of the B programming language and the Unix operating system and has achieved many successes. He is also one of the designers of the Go programming language, which was announced in 2009. He is also a licensed pilot.
He received a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of California in 1965. He later received his master's degree in 1966. After completing his master's degree, his business life started.
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.
Completing his master's degree in 1966, Thompson started working at Bell Laboratories. At Bell Laboratories, they worked with Dennis Ritchie on his first project, the Multics operating system. Multics was an ambitious and large operating system and needed to support many concurrent users. But it was difficult to realize this and the project disappeared.
While working on Multics, Thompson also made a video game called Space Travel.
Although the Multics project was canceled, Thompson wrote an operating system with the help of Dennis Ritchie. Brian Kernighan named this operating system Unix in 1970.
Thompson thought that this operating system needed a systems programming language. This idea led him to develop the B programming language. Thus, the B programming language was developed by Ken Thompson in 1970. The B programming language was also a precursor to the C programming language, which was later written by Dennis Ritchie.
In the 1960s he also worked on QED, a line-oriented text editor. He developed a version of QED called the 'Compatible Timesharing System', which includes regular expressions.
Along with QED, Thompson also developed a standard text editor in Unix. He later invented Thompson's construction algorithm.
Ken Thompson wrote a chess game program using the first version of Unix. Later, they developed Belle, a chess computer, with Joseph Condon. In 1980, Belle won the US and World Computerized Chess Championships.
Belle was later donated to the Smithsonian, the world's largest research complex and museum.
In the mid-1980s, he started working on a new operating system. He used the principles of Unix in this system called Plan 9.
Later, Thompson also became interested in the C++ language being developed by Bjarne Stroustrup. But then he gave up working on C++.
By 1992, Thompson and Rob Pike developed the UTF-8 encoding scheme.
Thompson retired from Bell Laboratories on December 1, 2000. He worked at Entrisphere Inc. for about 5 years. Later, he started working at Google. At Google, Thompson, together with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer, developed the Go programming language.
Ken Thompson is also interested in the distribution and security of digital music for networked computers. He also worked on the development of the PathStar Access Server, which provides packet data and voice services over the Internet.