-
Birth
Kenneth Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 4th, 1943 -
Bachelors Degree
In 1965 Ken graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a bachelors degree of science. -
Masters Degree
In 1966 Ken graduated with a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. -
Period: to
Space Travel
During his time at Bell Labs ken created the video game named space travel . Space travel was a single player stimulation game that was officially released in 1969. -
Period: to
Hired @ Bell Labs
After receiving his masters he was hired at bell labs. He created the bon programming language while working with Dennis Ritchie on the Multics operating system. -
UNIX
In the 70s ken developed the unix operating system, after the first few versions of the software he started to work with Dennis Ritchie to further develop the system. -
Break & BDE
In '75 ken took a break from bell labs and went back to UC Berkeley. During his time in Berkeley he installed the 6th version of unix on a PDP-11/70. Berkeley maintained this as their own system under the name BDE (Berkeley Software Distribution). -
Period: to
Belle
Between 1976 and 1980, He collaborated with Joe Condon to create Belle, a champion chess computer. Joe worked on hardware while Ken worked on software. -
Development
In the 80s Ken and Dennis worked together to improve the unix system, during this time they developed the 8th, 9th and 10th versions of Unix. -
Turing Award
In 1983 ken and Dennis received the Turing award for the development and implementation of the Unix operating system -
Inferno
During the 90s ken worked with dennis and coworkers at bell labs to create the inferno operating system which was a research operating system. -
Period: to
Three's a Charm
During the 90's Ken and Dennis received three accolades for their work on the Unix operating system.
1990-IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
1997-Inducted as members into the Computer History Museum
1999-The 1998 National Medal of Technology was awarded to them by president Bill Clinton. -
UTF-8
In 1992 with the help of rob pike, ken created the UTF-8 encoding. This encoding has become the dominant character encoding for the WWW and is accounting for more than half of all web pages. -
Tsutomu Kanai Award
In 1999 ken received the first ever Tsutomu Kanai Award for his work on the UNIX operating system -
Retire from bell labs
In the late 2000s ken retired from bell labs, he currently works as a distinguished engineer at Google.