Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson
Brian Kernighan (left) and Ken Thompson (right) in 2019
Born	Kenneth Lane Thompson (1943-02-04) February 4, 1943 (age 81) New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of California, Berkeley (B.S., 1965; M.S., 1966)
Known for	Multics Unix B (programming language) Belle (chess machine) UTF-8 Plan 9 from Bell Labs Inferno (operating system) grep Endgame tablebase Go
Awards	IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award (1982)[1] Turing Award (1983) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1985)[2] IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (1990) Computer Pioneer Award (1994) National Medal of Technology (1998) Tsutomu Kanai Award (1999) Harold Pender Award (2003) Japan Prize (2011)
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	Bell Labs Entrisphere, Inc Google

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-developed 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. He won the Turing Award in 1983 with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie.