Ken Thompson
American computer scientist who created Unix and co-developed Go.
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via Wikipedia: Ken Thompson · see source
Kenneth Lane Thompson was the principal inventor of UNIX.[1] The ACM Turing Award was presented to Thompson jointly with Dennis Ritchie in 1983.[2][3][1]
Life and work
Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a master's degree in 1966 from the University of California, Berkeley.[4] Bell Labs withdrew from the MULTICS project in 1969, and Thompson decided to write his own operating system so he could run his game on a PDP-7.[1] In 1972, Thompson rewrote the UNIX kernel in C, making it portable.[1] Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 for the implementation of the UNIX operating system.[3]
Bell Labs employed Thompson starting in 1966, assigning him to the MULTICS project.[1][5] The name "Unix" was proposed by Brian Kernighan in 1970 as a play on "Multics".[6]
What the cited sources add
The Linux Information Project account states that Thompson was a "navy brat" during his childhood.[1] It also notes that Thompson's first public presentation about UNIX was in 1973.[1] Cox's article explains that Ken Thompson introduced regular expressions to programmers in his implementation of the text editor QED for CTSS.[7] Cox describes Thompson's NFA simulation as being a million times faster than Perl on a 29-character string.[7]
Cox credits Thompson with inventing the multiple-state simulation approach in his 1968 paper.[7] The Dr. Dobb's interview records Thompson stating that the first versions of Unix were written by him.[8]
References
- "Ken Thompson: A Brief Introduction", The Linux Information Project, August 24, 2007. facts only, no text reused. linfo.org
- Wikipedia, "Ken Thompson" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "A.M. Turing Award Winners by Year", amturing.acm.org; Naskar, "11 Most Influential & Greatest Programmers Of All Time - The Developer Story", thedeveloperstory.com, 2021-06-09; Hossain, "Top 10 Greatest Programmers in the World of all Time", Medium, 2023-02-01; "Top Programmers in the World of All Time", GeeksforGeeks, 2019-09-26 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Ken Thompson" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Thompson, "Reflections on Trusting Trust", Communications of the ACM, August 1984, p. 761–763; Cox, "Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler", October 25, 2023 (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Ken Thompson" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Thesis Students", Elwyn Berlekamp's Home Page (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Ken Thompson" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: "Ken Thompson: A Brief Introduction", The Linux Information Project, August 24, 2007 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia, "Ken Thompson" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: Ritchie, "The Evolution of the Unix Time-sharing System"; Ritchie, "The Development of the C Language", Bell Labs (original not read by us) en.wikipedia.org
- Cox, "Regular Expression Matching Can Be Simple And Fast". facts only, no text reused. swtch.com
- Wikipedia, "Ken Thompson" (CC BY-SA 4.0), which cites: McIlroy, "A Research Unix reader: annotated excerpts from the Programmer's Manual, 1971–1986", 1987; "Dr. Dobb's: Interview with Ken Thompson", 2011-05-18 (we also read that source) en.wikipedia.org
Each numbered sentence above was checked against the source it cites before publication. Sentences citing Wikipedia adapt text from the English Wikipedia article Ken Thompson (contributors), used under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is available under the same licence. Other sources were used for facts only; no text or images are copied from them.
Also in the Codexery
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Ken Thompson (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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