1997 ken thompson

Ken Thompson

By clairemusson

  • Born

    Born

  • Bachelor of Science

    Bachelor of Science
    In 1965 Ken received his bachelor's degree in science at the University of California.

  • Master's Degree

    Master's Degree
    A year later, Ken got his masters degree in electrical engineering at Berkeley.

  • Job

    Job
    After he got his masters, he was hired by Bell Labs.

  • Creations

    Creations
    After being hired, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie started to create the Multics operating system.

  • More Creations that Year

    Ken Thompson also created the Bon programming language while writing Multics. He then also ended up creating the video game called Space Travel.

  • Unix

    Throughout the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Unix operating system together.

  • Rest from Bell Labs

    Thompson took a break from the Bell Labs and went back to Berkeley where he installed the Version 6 Unix on a PDP-11/70. This would then lead Unix at Berkeley to be its own system, known as the Berkeley Software Distribution.

  • More Work on Unix

    Throughout the 1980s, both Thompson and Ritchie continued to make Unix a better operating system, which lead Unix to adopt a BSD codebase for the 8th, 9th, and 10th editions.

  • National Academy of Engineering

    Ken Thompson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for designing Unix.

  • Turing Award

    Both Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system".

  • Back at Bell Labs

    He came back to the Bell Labs to work on a new operating system as a replacement for Unix.

  • Encoding

    n 1992, Thompson developed the UTF-8 encoding scheme. Today, the UTF-8 encoding has since become the main character of encoding for the Web all over the world.

  • National Medal of Technology

    Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language.

  • Retiring from Bell Labs

    Thompson retired from Bell Labs. Then he started to work at Entrisphere, Inc as a fellow until 2006. Now he works at Google as a Distinguished Engineer.

  • Japan Prize

    Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications for the work they put into the development of the Unix operating system.