Ken thompson and dennis ritchie 1973

Ken Thompson

By cdpeterson

  • Birth

    Kenneth Lane Thompson was born on February 4, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana.

  • Undergraduate Degree

    In 1965, Thompson graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley,

  • Master's Graduation

    In 1966, Thompson graduated with a Master's of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley,

  • Hired

    In 1966, Thompson was hired at Bell Labs. His first project was working on Multic with long-time colleague Dennis Ritchie, inventor of the C programming language.

  • Regex

    In the 1960s, Thompson also began work on regular expressions. QED and Thompson's later editor ed contributed greatly to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, and regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs.

  • UNIX

    In 1969, Thompson collaborated with Dennis Ritchie to create the UNIX operating system.

  • B

    In 1969, Thompson create the B programming language as a system programming language for UNIX. Ritchie would later develop B into the C programming language.

  • Belle

    In 1972, Thompson began to work on Belle, a chess computer program, which would later become the first machine to achieve master-level play.

  • National Academy of Engineering

    In 1980, Thompson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "designing UNIX, an operating system whose efficiency, breadth, power, and style have guided a generation's exploitation of minicomputers".

  • Turing Award

    In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system".

  • Plan 9 from Bell Labs

    in the late 1980s, Thompson began working on Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a successor to UNIX.

  • IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

    In 1990, both Thompson and Dennis Ritchie received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), "for the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language".

  • UTF-8

    In 1992, Thompson developed the UTF-8 encoding scheme together with Rob Pike.

  • Retired

    In 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs

  • Go

    In 2012, version 1.0 of the Go operating system was released to the public, co-developed by Thompson.