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Born in New Orleans, Louisiana.
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Receives a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley
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Receives a Master's Degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley.
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Hired by Bell Labs after graduation and is assigned to work on the Multics project with Dennis Ritchie.
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Develops the B programming language with Dennis Ritchie.
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Develops the video game "Space Travel".
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After Bell Labs withdraws from the Multics Project, Thompson begins to rewrite "Space Travel" so it can be ported to the PDP-7.
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Thompson and Dennis Ritchie lead a team that begins development of a new operating system using the tools that were left from the Multics project.
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The operating system developed by Thompson and Ritchie's team is completed and named UNIX.
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Thompson and Dennis Ritchie receive funding for a PDP-11/20.
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The UNIX Programmer's Manual is published.
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UNIX is rewritten in the C language.
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UNIX is presented for the first time to the outside world at the 1973 Symposium on Operating System Principles.
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Thompson takes a sabbatical from Bell Labs and goes to UC Berkeley in order to install Unix Version 6 on a PDP-11/70. *Unix at Berkeley would later become its own system, known as the Berkeley Software Distribution.
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Thompson is elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "designing UNIX, an operating system whose efficiency, breadth, power, and style have guided generation's exploitation of minicomputers."
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Thompson and Dennis Ritchie jointly receive the Turing Award for "their development of generic operation systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system."
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Thompson along with Joseph Condon create Belle, a world champion chess computer.
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Both Thompson and Dennis Ritchie receive the Richard W. Hamming Medal for "the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language."
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Thompson helps develop the UTF-8 encoding scheme. *To this day, UTF-8 is the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web.
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Thompson and Dennis Ritchie begin to work on a new operating system called Inferno.
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The Inferno Beta is released to the public. *The latest version of Inferno (version 4) was released on March 28, 2015.
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Both Thompson and Dennis Ritchie are induced as fellows of the Computer History Museum for "the co-creation of the UNIX operating system and for development of the C programming language."
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Thompson and Dennis Ritchie jointly receive the 1998 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton for "co-inventing the UNIX operating system and C programming language."
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The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers choose Thompson to receive the first Tsutomu Kanai Award for "his role in creating the UNIX operating system, which for decades has been a key platform for distributed systems work."
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Thompson retires from Bell Labs.
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Worked at Entrisphere, Inc. as a fellow.
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Thompson is hired by Google as a Distinguished Engineer.
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Thompson, Robert Griesemer, and Rob Pike begin development of the Go programming language.
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The Go programming language is publicly released. *The latest version of Go (version 1.8) was released on February 16, 2017.
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Thompson, along with Dennis Ritchie, is awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications for "the pioneering work in the development of the Unix operating system."
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Thompson is alive and well and still currently works at Google as a Distinguished Engineer.
