Kenneth Lane Thompson is a computer scientist, commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, who created the UNIX operating system.
Some notable contributions included the invention of the B programming language, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on regular expressions, early text editors such as QED and ed , and the chess machine Belle.

Life

Kenneth was born on February 4, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana. He earned a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966, both in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley.

After graduation, he was hired by Bell Labs, where he worked on the MULTICS project, a time-sharing system funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency together with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and General Electric Co.
But the project became unwieldy and the AT&T Corporation withdrew from it and so Bell Labs.

Thanks to the experience gained during these years, in 1969 with colleague Dennis Ritchie he created the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs. It was a scaled-down version of the MULTICS.
For the UNIX operating system Thompson needed a system programming language and he created B, a precursor to Ritchie's C language.

In the 1970s Thompson and Ritchie worked together on the UNIX operating system and he, in collaboration with Joe Condon, developed a chess computer, Belle, which was the first computer created for the sole purpose of chess playing and in 1983 it became the first master-level machine nonetheless it won the 1980 World Computer Chess Championship.

During the mid-1980s, he began working on a new operating system based on UNIX, the Plan 9 from Bell Labs.

Thompson quitted Bell Labs in 2000 and was hired by Entrisphere, Inc until 2006, when he moved to Google as a Distinguished Engineer.

Work

Ken Thompson invented the UNIX operating system at Bell Labs and the program language B, which has been soon replaced by Ritchie's C.
UNIX operating system was one of the first operating system written in a high-level language, which could be installed in almost every computer. In 1973 he made his first public presentation about UNIX.

Thompson thinks that the success of UNIX is due to serendipity, to the fact that it helped changing from highly centralised mainframe computers to smaller, less expensive and decentralised and he added:

I am a very bottom-up thinker. If you give me the right kind of Tinker Toys, I can imagine the building. I can sit there and see primitives and recognize their power to build structures a half mile high, if only I had just one more to make it functionally complete. I can see those kinds of things.

In 1992 Thompson developed the UTF-8 encoding in collaboration with Rob Pike, which is the mostly used character encoding for the World Wide Web.

Recent work has included the co-design of the Go programming language.

Awards

In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie received the ACM Turing award. This is widely considered to be the most prestigious award in the academic computer science community.

In 1997, both Ritchie and Thompson were made Fellows of the Computer History Museum, for co-creation of the UNIX operating system, and for development of the C programming language.

In 1999 Thompson received from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers the first Tsutomu Kanai Award for his role in creating the UNIX operating system, which for decades has been a key platform for distributed systems work.
In the same year he, with Ritchie, was awarded by President Bill Clinton the National Medal of Technology of 1998 for co-creating the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which, as stated in the citation for the medal:

led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age.

In 2011, Thompson, with Ritchie, received the Japan Prize for Information and Communications for the Unix operating system.