Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. He is best known as the co-creator of the Unix operating system and the inventor of the B programming language. With Dennis Ritchie, Thompson also contributed to the development of the C programming language and later co-created the Go programming language at Google. He received the Turing Award in 1983 jointly with Ritchie.
Biography
Thompson began his career at Bell Labs in 1966, where he worked on the Multics operating system. Dissatisfied with its complexity, he and Ritchie developed a simpler, more modular system that became Unix. In 1969, Thompson wrote the first version of Unix on a PDP-7, using the B language which he created as a stripped-down version of BCPL. The success of Unix led to its widespread adoption in academia and industry.
After leaving Bell Labs, Thompson taught at the University of California, Berkeley for a time before joining Google in 2006. At Google, he collaborated with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer on the design of the Go programming language, which was publicly announced in 2009.
Contributions
- Co-creator of the Unix operating system
- Inventor of the B programming language
- Co-developer of the C programming language (with Dennis Ritchie)
- Co-creator of the Go programming language
- Developer of the Thompson shell for early Unix
- Proponent of the Bell Labs philosophy of software simplicity
Awards and honors
- 1983: Turing Award (with Dennis Ritchie)
- 1990: IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
- 1998: National Medal of Technology (with Ritchie)
- 1999: Member of the National Academy of Engineering