Ken Thompson developer of the UNIX operating system and C language

Ken Thompson from childhood was fascinated by logic. As he noted later, even in elementary school, he would work out arithmetic problems in binary. This love led him into the computer world, where his achievements were incomparable and always original.

Ken Thompson: study

In 1943, Ken was born in New Orleans (Louisiana). In his youth Ken Thompson studied at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1965–1966 received first a bachelor and master of science on electronic devices and information systems. His supervisor was Alvin Berlekamp.

Bell Labs

In 1966, showing a great ability scientist Ken Thompson was enacted in a powerful Corporation, Bell Labs, known as the largest and the most glorious research center that deals with electronics and computer technology. Its headquarters is located in Murray hill. Before coming young developers at Bell Labs engineered the MAC. Within it was created CTSS OS. Then the lab started working on Multix.

Here Ken met with Dennis Ritchie. They are like-minded and began to work together with other scientists of the laboratory. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie saw the future for small desktop personal computers. They understand that computers need a mechanism that controls the hardware of the computer executing the file, execute application programs, input and output. Thus was born the idea of creating a new operating system. All 70-e years, Thompson and Ritchie worked on UNIX. Its first version was created by Thompson almost single-handedly, and Ritchie joined later.

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At the same time Ken Thompson invented the language of Bon, and then – language B on the basis of which was later created the C language, and began to develop the game "Space travel". The game was modeled Solar system bodies. The spacecraft needed to land on planets or satellites. Lab abandoned the project Multix. In 1969, Thompson and Ritchie developed the OS UNICS, later renamed UNIX. Thompson created the editor Qed for CTSS, which included regular expressions for manipulation of strings in the text. This project made regular expressions popular in programming, not only in the logic. They started to use UNIX in word processing software. Nowadays, most programs that work with regular expressions, using the notation of Thompson. Ken also invented the algorithm named after him, to convert regular expressions to nondeterministic finite state machine.

Work on chess programs

From the XVIII century, people were trying to create chess machines. The attempt failed in 1983, when Thompson and Condon created Belle, the first computer has reached the level of chess master. Thompson wrote the complete enumeration of endgame for 4–6 figures. Later, with the help of a chess expert John Roycroft, he recorded them on CD-ROM. New and improved chess computer in 1994, defeated Garry Kasparov.

Further activities

In the mid 80-ies of Thompson at Bell Labs began to design a new OS that was supposed to be a replacement for UNIX. It was called "plan 9". Also at this time, he has been testing early versions of C++, but expressed to him a negative attitude, not endorsing the ideas that formed the basis of the language.

In 1992, together with Rob Pike he developed the UTF-8 encoding, which became the basis for the World Wide Web. In the 90-ies, together with Ritchie and other researchers from Bell Labs, he began the process of forming the operating system Inferno.

In 2000, Thompson left Bell Labs. Until 2006 he worked at Entrisphere, then moved to Google, where he is working now on the language Go. This gifted scientist in the future can unfold your full creative potential.

Ken Thompson: achievements

The Main thing in his life – creating UNIX and the C programming language. Ken Thompson, the biography which was reviewed in the article, received in my life many awards.

In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie together received the award of Turing. In 1990 they were awarded the medal Richard Hamming of the IEEE for the creation of UNIX and the C language In 1994 – medal "pioneer of computer engineering”, also in conjunction with Ritchie. In 1999, President bill Clinton awarded Ritchie and Thompson the National medal. In 1999 Thompson won first prize Institute of engineers of electronics and electrical engineering for his role in creating the UNIX OS, in 2003, together with Ritchie – the award of the Harold Pender. Japan is also noted for its innovative design (award 2011).