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Ken ThompsonComputer science pioneer, developer of Unix, Plan 9, B, Golang, UTF-8.
Date of Birth: 04.02.1943
Country:  USA |
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Kenneth Thompson
Computer Science Pioneer, Creator of Unix, Plan 9, B, Go, UTF-8Kenneth Lane Thompson, an American computer scientist, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1943. He obtained his B.S. in 1965 and M.S. in 1966 in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
Unix and C
In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie collaborated on the Multics operating system. During this time, Thompson developed the Bon programming language. Later, Bell Labs abandoned Multics, deeming it overly ambitious and unlikely to yield a usable product.
In 1969, Thompson and Ritchie created the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. Thompson also devised the B programming language, a precursor to Ritchie's C language.
Regular Expressions
Thompson developed a version of the QED editor for CTSS that incorporated regular expressions for text searching. QED and Thompson's ed editor (the standard editor in UNIX) significantly popularized regular expressions, previously considered a tool for logicians. Regular expressions became prevalent in UNIX text-processing programs like grep. Today, nearly all programs that employ regular expressions use a variant of Thompson's notation.
Belle and Chess
With Joseph Condon, Thompson created the hardware and software for Belle, a chess-playing computer. He also wrote a program that generated a complete list of endgames for 4, 5, and 6 pieces, enabling it to make sound moves when a saved position was reached. Later, with chess expert John Roycroft, Thompson expanded his early results on CD. Thompson's programming style influenced others, particularly in its brevity and clarity of expression.
Later Career
In the late 2000s, Thompson left Bell Labs. He worked at Entrisphere, Inc. until 2006 and currently works at Google, where he contributes to the development of the Go programming language.
Awards
Together with Dennis Ritchie, Thompson received the Emanuel R. Piore Award in 1982 and the Turing Award in 1983 for their development of general-purpose operating systems and, in particular, for the creation of UNIX.
Other awards include the C&C Prize (1989), Richard W. Hamming Medal (1990), Computer Pioneer Medal (1994), National Medal of Technology (1998), Tsutomu Kanai Award (1999), Harold Pender Award (2003), and Japan Prize (2011).
