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Born
Kenneth Lane Thompson was born on February 4, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana. -
Bachelor's Degree
Received Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley -
Master's Degree
Received Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California Berkeley -
Hired by Bell Labs
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MULTICS
Ken Thompson, and coworker Dennis Ritchie, were assigned to work on the MULTICS project by Bell Labs in the 1960s. MULTICS was "the advanced time-sharing system constructed jointly by Bell Labs and MIT" (Ritchie and Thompson 365). -
B programming language
While working on MULTICS, Thompson developed the B programming language based mainly on the BCPL (Basic Programming Combined Language) language that he used at Bell Labs. The B language was “the precursor to Dennis Ritchie’s C” (Siebel 449). -
UNIX
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invent the UNIX operating system. UNIX is a powerful and flexible operating system and is used on a variety of machines from micros to supercomputers. -
Belle Program
Thompson created, along with Joseph Condon, was the first world champion chess computer known as the Belle program. -
National Academy of Engineering
Thompson was named to the National Academy of Engineering for his UNIX work. -
Turning Award
Thompson and Ritchie were “jointly given the Turing Award for UNIX and their development of operating systems theory” (Press 318). -
Plan 9
First edition of Plan 9 was released. . “Plan 9 was used at Bell Labs for operating systems research, and it remains in development at Bell Labs and by MIT personnel” (Press 317). -
UTF-8
Thompson and Rob Pike developed the UTF-8 character encoding scheme, which has become the predominant encoding scheme on the World Wide Web, in use on more than half of its pages -
IEEE Pioneer Award
Thompson and Dennis Ritchie received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for their UNIX operationg system and C programming language -
National Medal in Technology
Thompson and Ritchie also received “the National Medal in Technology from Bill Clinton in 1999” (O’Regan 219). -
Retired from Bell Labs
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Google
Thompson now works at Google in which he co-designed the Go programming language with Pike and Robert Griesemer. “Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software” (Donovan and Kernighan 7), and is “designed for extremely fast compiling, it is also fairly easy to learn, relying on clean syntax and a small number of basic language concepts” (Press 318).
