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Birth
Ken Thompson was born -
Thompson earned a Bachelor of Science
Thompson received his BS electrical engineering and computer science from Berkeley. -
Thompson earned a masters degree
He received his masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from Berkeley. -
Hired by Bell Labs
The same year Thompson received his masters degree, he was hired by Bell Labs. He later went on to create video game Space Travel with colleague Dennis Ritchie. -
Coined the phrase UNIX
Going off of creating video games, Ken used these tools to created UNIX. The official name was coined suggested by Brian Kernighan. -
Created programming language B for UNIX
Thompson decided that UNIX needed to be an operating system and created programming language B -
Installs Version 6 UNIX at UC Berkeley
Thompson briefly left Bell Labs to help UC Berkeley install Version 6 of UNIX. -
Received the Turing Award
Ritchie and Thompson received the Turing award for the development of UNIX -
Began designing Plan 9
After years of development on UNIX, Thompson began creating Plan 9, a new operating system for Bell Labs. -
Developed UTF-8
Thompson created encoding scheme known as UTF-8. UTF-8 is still used for roughly half of all pages found on the internet. -
Began to create Inferno
Thompson in partnership with colleagues at Bell Labs created the Inferno OS -
Inducted as Fellow of the Computer History Museum
Ritchie and Tompson were inducted as Fellows of the Computer History Museum due to their creation of UNIX -
Retired from Bell Labs in late 2000's
Thompson retires from Bell Labs after roughly 46 years. -
Began to work for Google
Ken was hired at google as a Distinguished Engineer. -
Awarded Japan Prize for Information and Communications
Thompson and Dennis Ritchie who helped him create Inferno were awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications.
