Ken Thompson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ken Thompson
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Thompson, 2019
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Kenneth Lane Thompson
February 4, 1943 New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
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| Alma mater | University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1965; M.S., 1966) |
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| Fields | Computer science |
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Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American computer scientist. He is known as a pioneer in the world of computers. For most of his career, Thompson worked at Bell Labs. There, he helped create the first Unix operating system.
He also invented the B programming language, which led to the popular C language. Thompson was also a key person in developing the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, he has worked at Google, where he helped create the Go language.
Thompson also made other important contributions. He worked on regular expressions, which are patterns used to find text. He helped create early computer text editors like QED and ed. He also defined the UTF-8 encoding, which helps computers understand text from different languages. In computer chess, he created endgame tablebases and the chess machine called Belle. In 1983, he won the Turing Award with his colleague Dennis Ritchie.
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Early Life and Education
Ken Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. When asked how he learned about computers, Thompson said he was always interested in logic. Even in grade school, he would work on math problems using binary numbers. He did this just because he found it fascinating.
Thompson studied at the University of California, Berkeley. He earned his bachelor's degree in 1965. The next year, in 1966, he received his master's degree. Both degrees were in electrical engineering and computer sciences.
Career and Research Highlights
Thompson joined Bell Labs in 1966. In the 1960s, he and Dennis Ritchie worked on an operating system called Multics. While working on Multics, Thompson created a programming language called Bon. He also made a video game called Space Travel.
Later, Bell Labs stopped working on the Multics project. To keep playing his game, Thompson found an old PDP-7 computer. He rewrote Space Travel to run on it. The tools he developed for this game eventually became the Unix operating system.
Creating the Unix Operating System
Working on the PDP-7, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie developed Unix. They created a way to organize files, ideas for computer processes, and device files. They also made a way to type commands, called a command-line interpreter. They added pipes for programs to talk to each other easily. In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix." It was a playful twist on "Multics."
After starting Unix, Thompson realized it needed a special programming language. So, he created B. This language was a step before Ritchie's C language.
Thompson also started working on regular expressions in the 1960s. He developed a version of the text editor QED that could search text using regular expressions. His later editor, ed, also used them. These editors helped make regular expressions very popular. Today, most programs that use regular expressions use a style similar to Thompson's.
Working with Dennis Ritchie
Throughout the 1970s, Thompson and Ritchie worked closely on the Unix operating system. They created so much for Research Unix that it was said their names could be linked to almost everything. In an interview, Thompson shared that he wrote the first few versions of Unix by himself. Dennis Ritchie then became a strong supporter of the system and helped develop it further.
I did the first of two or three versions of UNIX all alone. And Dennis became an evangelist. Then there was a rewrite in a higher-level language that would come to be called C. He worked mostly on the language and on the I/O system, and I worked on all the rest of the operating system. That was for the PDP-11, which was serendipitous, because that was the computer that took over the academic community.
The feedback from Thompson's Unix work also helped improve the C programming language. Thompson later said that C "grew up with one of the rewritings of the system." This made it perfect for writing operating systems.
In 1975, Thompson took a break from Bell Labs. He went to his old university, UC Berkeley. There, he helped set up Version 6 Unix on a PDP-11/70 computer. Unix at Berkeley later became its own system, known as the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD).
Computer Chess and Tablebases
In 1971, Thompson wrote a chess program called "chess" for the first version of Unix. Later, with Joseph Condon, Thompson created Belle. This was a special computer designed to play chess, and it became a world champion chess computer.
He also wrote programs to list all possible moves in chess endings. These are called endgame tablebases. They cover all 4, 5, and 6-piece endings. This allows chess programs to make "perfect" moves once they reach a position stored in these tablebases. Thompson shared his first results on CD-ROMs.
New Operating Systems and Languages
In the mid-1980s, Bell Labs started working on a new operating system to replace Unix. Thompson was very important in designing and building Plan 9 from Bell Labs. This new system used ideas from Unix but applied them more widely.
In 1992, Thompson and Rob Pike developed the UTF-8 encoding. UTF-8 helps computers display text from many different languages. It has become the main way to encode Unicode for the World Wide Web. By 2019, over 90% of all web pages used UTF-8.
In the 1990s, work began on the Inferno operating system. This was another research operating system built around a portable virtual machine. Thompson and Ritchie continued to work together on Inferno.
Working at Google
In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs. In 2004, he helped create Turochamp. This was a chess program that Alan Turing designed in 1948, even before computers existed that could run it.
Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google. He was a Distinguished Engineer and is now a Google Advisor. One of his recent projects was helping to design the Go programming language. He said that when he, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer started Go, it was pure research.
When the three of us [Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer] got started, it was pure research. The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++. [laughter] ... [Returning to Go,] we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason.
Awards and Recognition
Turing Award
In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie received the Turing Award. This award is like the Nobel Prize for computer science. They won it for creating the Unix operating system. In his acceptance speech, "Reflections on Trusting Trust," Thompson talked about a clever computer security trick. This trick is now known as the Thompson hack or the trusting trust attack. It is considered a very important work in computer security.
Other Major Awards
- In 1980, Thompson was chosen for the National Academy of Engineering.
- In 1985, he became a Member of the National Academy of Sciences.
- In 1990, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal.
- In 1997, both Thompson and Ritchie were honored as Fellows of the Computer History Museum.
- In 1999, President Bill Clinton gave Thompson and Ritchie the National Medal of Technology.
- Also in 1999, Thompson received the first Tsutomu Kanai Award.
- In 2011, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were given the Japan Prize for Information and Communications.
Personal Life
Ken Thompson is married and has a son. He used to use Apple products. However, he later switched to Raspberry Pi OS because he had some issues with Apple products.
See also
In Spanish: Ken Thompson para niños
- Brian Kernighan
- Rob Pike
- Dennis Ritchie
