Ken Thompson

<p>Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of <a href="/facts/Computer_science/lN3pEyPz">computer science</a>. Thompson worked at <a href="/facts/Bell_Labs/fKP5Gk0H">Bell Labs</a> for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original <a href="/facts/Unix/0pNL2seI">Unix</a> operating system. He also invented the <a href="/facts/B_(programming_language)/b9n2WoNN">B programming language</a>, the direct predecessor to the <a href="/facts/C_(programming_language)/Ky2No763">C language</a>, and was one of the creators and early developers of the <a href="/facts/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs/pQjPlS7w">Plan 9</a> operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at <a href="/facts/Google/GT9Sugza">Google</a>, where he co-developed the <a href="/facts/Go_(programming_language)/oWlsmAFJ">Go language</a>. A recipient of the Turing award, he is considered one of the greatest computer programmers of all time.
</p><p>Other notable contributions included his work on <a href="/facts/Regular_expression/KFL3veHX">regular expressions</a> and early computer text editors <a href="/facts/QED_(text_editor)/hlhhFXTJ">QED</a> and <a href="/facts/Ed_(text_editor)/a3lSk6Ry">ed</a>, the definition of the <a href="/facts/UTF-8/xlaVHSyf">UTF-8</a> encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of <a href="/facts/Endgame_tablebase/PSeEbcYT">endgame tablebases</a> and the chess machine <a href="/facts/Belle_(chess_machine)/72gS6MPv">Belle</a>. He won the <a href="/facts/Turing_Award/HbEEp0GF">Turing Award</a> in 1983 with his long-term colleague <a href="/facts/Dennis_Ritchie/I1yu1UWU">Dennis Ritchie</a>.
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Ken Thompson open-in-new

Ken Thompson