PERSON
Ken Thompson
Principal designer of UNIX (1969). Author of the B language, the predecessor of C. Worked at Bell Labs and later at Google. Co-recipient with Dennis Ritchie of the 1983 ACM Turing Award. Later co-designed the Go programming language (2009).
Profile
- Born
- 1943
- Status
- Living
- Span
- 83 years
- Appearances
- 03
- Name
- ENKen ThompsonJAケン・トンプソン
Appearances
- 1969The Birth of UNIX — Bell LabsHaving left the Multics project, Ken Thompson at AT&T Bell Labs began writing a small timesharing system on an idle PDP-7. Initially an experiment for one user, it gained a second when Dennis Ritchie joined; in 1970 it was named UNICS (later UNIX). Its rewrite in the C language (1972) gave it portability, and the operating-system lineage that followed has dominated the next half-century. Linux, macOS, Android, and iOS all descend from it.
- 1972The C Language — Dennis RitchieDennis Ritchie at Bell Labs extended Ken Thompson's B language with a type system, producing C. UNIX was rewritten in it in 1973, making it the first language in which an operating system could be moved to different hardware as source code. Together with the 1978 K&R book *The C Programming Language*, C became the de facto standard of systems programming for more than half a century. C++, Objective-C, C#, Go, Rust, Zig, and most current systems languages either descend from C or are deliberately designed against its model.
- November 2009Go Released — GoogleA systems programming language designed at Google by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson (the UNIX author). Starting from frustration with C++ build times and complexity, it combined garbage collection, lightweight concurrency via goroutines, and a deliberately simple syntax. Most of the cloud-native infrastructure of the 2010s—Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Prometheus—is written in Go.