Ken Thompson (computer programmer)

Kenneth Thompson
Thompson (left) with Dennis Ritchie.
Born	(1943-02-04) February 4, 1943 (age 74) New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Nationality	American
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Bell Labs Entrisphere, Inc Google Inc.
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1965; M.S., 1966)
Known for	Unix B (programming language) Belle (chess machine) UTF-8 Endgame tablebase Go
Notable awards	IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1982) Turing Award (1983) Computer Pioneer Award (1994) Computer History Museum Fellow (1997) National Medal of Technology (1998) Tsutomu Kanai Award (1999) Japan Prize (2011)

Kenneth Lane "Ken" Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson 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 systems. 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, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.

Thompson was born in New Orleans. When asked how he learned to program, Thompson stated, "I was always fascinated with logic and even in grade school I'd work on arithmetic problems in binary, stuff like that. Just because I was fascinated."

Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a Master's degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp.