Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply ken in hacker circles), is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding of the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems.
Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Scienc...
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Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply ken in hacker circles), is an American pioneer of computer science notable for his work with the B programming language and his shepherding of the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems.
Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp.
In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language. The two left the Multics project when Bell Labs withdrew from it, but they used the experience from the project, and in 1969, Thompson and Ritchie became the principal creators of the Unix operating system. At this time, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and...
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