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Ken Thompson
Creating the original Unix operating system and helping design UTF-8 and Go.
Unix · UTF-8
- Born
- 4 February 1943
- Birthplace
- New Orleans, United States
More people
Ken Thompson
Thompson’s work ranges from operating systems and programming languages to computer chess. His Bell Labs collaboration with Dennis Ritchie helped establish tools and ideas still fundamental to computing.
Early life
Interest in logic
Was drawn to arithmetic and logical problems before becoming a programmer.
Berkeley training
Earned degrees in electrical engineering and computer science at Berkeley in 1965 and 1966.
Career
- 1966
Bell Labs
Joined the laboratory and worked on the Multics project before developing Unix.
- 1975
Berkeley sabbatical
Helped bring Unix to Berkeley, where it became the basis for further development.
- 2006
Google
Joined Google and later helped develop the Go programming language.
Contributions
Unix
Implemented the original version of the influential operating system.
UTF-8
With Rob Pike, designed an efficient way to encode characters from the world’s writing systems.
Go
Co-created the programming language publicly released by Google.
Beyond computing
Computer chess
Worked with Joe Condon on Belle, the 1980 world computer chess champion.
Trust in software
His Turing Award lecture showed why inspecting source code alone cannot establish that a compiler is trustworthy.
Sources & photo credit
Life, career and references ↗Institutional biography and contributions ↗Photo: A.C.Diller. CC BY-SA 4.0 · Original image. Cropped and displayed in monochrome.
