Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson
	Thompson in 2019
Born	Kenneth Lane Thompson; February 4, 1943; New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1965; M.S., 1966)
Known for	Multics; Unix; B (programming language); Belle (chess machine); UTF-8; Plan 9 from Bell Labs; Inferno (operating system); grep; Endgame tablebase; Go;
Awards	IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1982); Turing Award (1983); Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1985); IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (1990); Computer Pioneer Award (1994); National Medal of Technology (1998); Tsutomu Kanai Award (1999); Harold Pender Award (2003); Japan Prize (2011);
	Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Bell Labs; Entrisphere, Inc; Google;

Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science & Computer Chess Development. 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.

Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle. He won the Turing Award in 1983 with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie.

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