Ken Thompson

Kenneth Lane Thompson earned both his electrical engineering degrees at the University of California, Berkeley — a bachelor's in 1965 and a master's in 1966 — before joining Bell Laboratories that same year. He initially worked on the Multics project, an ambitious time-sharing operating system developed jointly by Bell, MIT, and General Electric. When AT&T withdrew from the project in 1969 and took back its computers, Thompson lost his working platform, including a game called Space Travel he had written for Multics. It was this practical constraint that sparked one of the most influential creations in computing history. Within months, Thompson had built on a spare PDP-7 the first versions of an operating system that was radically different: modular, portable, built on the philosophy that everything is a file. Dennis Ritchie, his Bell Labs colleague, quickly joined the project. Together they articulated Unix's founding principles — a small kernel, composable tools, hardware independence. Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix" in 1970. Thompson also invented the B programming language, derived from BCPL, to write the non-kernel system code. When B's limitations became apparent on the PDP-11, Ritchie extended it into the C language, in which the Unix kernel was rewritten between 1972 and 1973. Awarded the Turing Prize in 1983 alongside Ritchie, Thompson worked at Bell Labs until his retirement in 2000. Since 2006, he has been a Distinguished Engineer at Google, where he co-designed the Go programming language with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer. He had already co-invented UTF-8 encoding with Pike in 1992 — now the global standard for representing Unicode characters. His legacy is that of a systems architect who never stopped laying durable foundations.