Ken Thompson
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Thompson (left) with Dennis Ritchie
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Born |
Kenneth Lane Thompson
February 4, 1943 (age 77) New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
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Nationality | American |
Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1965; M.S., 1966) |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Computer science |
Institutions | Bell Labs Entrisphere, Inc |
Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.
Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.