Ken Thompson
Encyclopedia
Kenneth Lane Thompson commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

. Having worked at Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 for most of his career, Thompson is notable for his work with the B programming language (basing it mainly on the BCPL
BCPL
BCPL is a procedural, imperative, and structured computer programming language designed by Martin Richards of the University of Cambridge in 1966.- Design :...

 language he had used to write Unix while in the MULTICS
Multics
Multics was an influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

 project), the C programming language
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

, and as one of the creators and early developers of the Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 and Plan 9
Plan 9 from Bell Labs
Plan 9 from Bell Labs is a distributed operating system. It was developed primarily for research purposes as the successor to Unix by the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs between the mid-1980s and 2002...

 operating systems.

Other notable contributions included his work on regular expression
Regular expression
In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means for "matching" strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Abbreviations for "regular expression" include "regex" and "regexp"...

s and early computer text editors QED
QED (text editor)
QED is a line-oriented computer text editor that was developed by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch for the Berkeley Timesharing System running on the SDS 940. It was implemented by L...

 and ed
Ed (text editor)
ed is a line editor for the Unix operating system. It was one of the first end-user programs hosted on the system and has been standard in Unix-based systems ever since. ed was originally written in PDP-11/20 assembler by Ken Thompson in 1971...

, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebase
Endgame tablebase
An endgame tablebase is a computerized database that contains precalculated exhaustive analysis of a chess endgame position. It is typically used by a computer chess engine during play, or by a human or computer that is retrospectively analysing a game that has already been played.The tablebase...

s and the chess machine Belle
Belle (chess machine)
Belle was the name of a chess computer and its associated software, developed by Joe Condon and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s. Belle was the first computer built for the sole purpose of chess playing. The strongest computer chess system of its time, Belle achieved a USCF rating...

, and most recently the co-creation of Google's programming language Go
Go (programming language)
Go is a compiled, garbage-collected, concurrent programming language developed by Google Inc.The initial design of Go was started in September 2007 by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson. Go was officially announced in November 2009. In May 2010, Rob Pike publicly stated that Go was being...

.

Biography

Thompson was born in New Orleans. He received a Bachelor of Science
Bachelor of Science
A Bachelor of Science is an undergraduate academic degree awarded for completed courses that generally last three to five years .-Australia:In Australia, the BSc is a 3 year degree, offered from 1st year on...

 in 1965 and a master's degree
Master's degree
A master's is an academic degree granted to individuals who have undergone study demonstrating a mastery or high-order overview of a specific field of study or area of professional practice...

 in 1966, both in electrical engineering and computer science
Computer engineering
Computer engineering, also called computer systems engineering, is a discipline that integrates several fields of electrical engineering and computer science required to develop computer systems. Computer engineers usually have training in electronic engineering, software design, and...

, from the University of California, Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp
Elwyn Berlekamp
Elwyn Ralph Berlekamp is an American mathematician. He is a professor emeritus of mathematics and EECS at the University of California, Berkeley. Berlekamp is known for his work in information theory and combinatorial game theory....

.

In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie , was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system...

 worked on the Multics
Multics
Multics was an influential early time-sharing operating system. The project was started in 1964 in Cambridge, Massachusetts...

 operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language
Bon programming language
Bon was a programming language created by Ken Thompson while he worked on the MULTICS operating system.Bon was named either after Thompson's wife Bonnie or else, after "a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas" ....

. The two left the Multics project when Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...

 withdrew from it, but they used the experience from the project, and in 1969, Thompson and Ritchie became the principal creators of the Unix
Unix
Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...

. At this time, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and created B, a precursor to Ritchie's C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....

.

Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED
QED (text editor)
QED is a line-oriented computer text editor that was developed by Butler Lampson and L. Peter Deutsch for the Berkeley Timesharing System running on the SDS 940. It was implemented by L...

, which included regular expression
Regular expression
In computing, a regular expression provides a concise and flexible means for "matching" strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. Abbreviations for "regular expression" include "regex" and "regexp"...

s for searching text. QED and Thompson's later editor ed
Ed (text editor)
ed is a line editor for the Unix operating system. It was one of the first end-user programs hosted on the system and has been standard in Unix-based systems ever since. ed was originally written in PDP-11/20 assembler by Ken Thompson in 1971...

 (the default editor on Unix) contributed greatly to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, previously regarded mostly as a tool (or toy) for logicians. Regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs (such as grep
Grep
grep is a command-line text-search utility originally written for Unix. The name comes from the ed command g/re/p...

) and in modern programming languages such as Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...

; they are also a central concept in Rob Pike's sam
Sam (text editor)
Sam is a multi-file text editor based on structural regular expressions. It was originally designed in the early 1980s at Bell Labs by Rob Pike with the help of Ken Thompson and other Unix developers for the Blit windowing terminal running on Unix; it was later ported to other systems. Sam...

 text editor. Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson's notation for them.

Thompson also developed UTF-8
UTF-8
UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...

 (a widely used character encoding scheme) together with Rob Pike in 1992.

Along with Joseph Condon, he created the hardware and software for Belle
Belle (chess machine)
Belle was the name of a chess computer and its associated software, developed by Joe Condon and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs in the 1970s and 1980s. Belle was the first computer built for the sole purpose of chess playing. The strongest computer chess system of its time, Belle achieved a USCF rating...

, a world champion chess computer. He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess
Chess
Chess is a two-player board game played on a chessboard, a square-checkered board with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. It is one of the world's most popular games, played by millions of people worldwide at home, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.Each player...

 endings, known as endgame tablebase
Endgame tablebase
An endgame tablebase is a computerized database that contains precalculated exhaustive analysis of a chess endgame position. It is typically used by a computer chess engine during play, or by a human or computer that is retrospectively analysing a game that has already been played.The tablebase...

s, for all 4, 5, and 6-piece endings, allowing chess-playing computer programs to make "perfect" moves once a position stored in them is reached. Later, with the help of chess endgame expert John Roycroft
John Roycroft
Arthur John Roycroft is an English chess endgame study composer and author, who lives in North West London. He is married to Betty Roycroft...

, Thompson distributed his first results on CD-ROM.

Thompson's style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements.

In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs. He worked at Entrisphere, Inc as a fellow
Fellow
A fellow in the broadest sense is someone who is an equal or a comrade. The term fellow is also used to describe a person, particularly by those in the upper social classes. It is most often used in an academic context: a fellow is often part of an elite group of learned people who are awarded...

 until 2006 and now works at Google
Google
Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products, and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program...

 as a Distinguished Engineer.

Thompson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering
National Academy of Engineering
The National Academy of Engineering is a government-created non-profit institution in the United States, that was founded in 1964 under the same congressional act that led to the founding of the National Academy of Sciences...

 in 1980 for "designing UNIX, an operating systems whose efficiency, breadth, power, and style have guided a generation's exploitation of minicomputers."

Awards

Turing Award

In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award
Turing Award
The Turing Award, in full The ACM A.M. Turing Award, is an annual award given by the Association for Computing Machinery to "an individual selected for contributions of a technical nature made to the computing community. The contributions should be of lasting and major technical importance to the...

 for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system. His acceptance speech, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" presented the backdoor attack now known as the Thompson hack or trusting trust attack, and is widely considered a seminal computer security
Computer security
Computer security is a branch of computer technology known as information security as applied to computers and networks. The objective of computer security includes protection of information and property from theft, corruption, or natural disaster, while allowing the information and property to...

 work in its own right.

IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal

In 1990, both Thompson and Dennis Ritchie received the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence...

 (IEEE), "for the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language".

Fellow of the Computer History Museum

In 1997, both Thompson and Ritchie were inducted as Fellows of the Computer History Museum
Computer History Museum
The Computer History Museum is a museum established in 1996 in Mountain View, California, USA. The Museum is dedicated to preserving and presenting the stories and artifacts of the information age, and exploring the computing revolution and its impact on our lives.-History:The museum's origins...

 for "the co-creation of the UNIX operating system, and for development of the C programming language."

National Medal of Technology

On April 27, 1999, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the 1998 National Medal of Technology
National Medal of Technology
The National Medal of Technology and Innovation is an honor granted by the President of the United States to American inventors and innovators who have made significant contributions to the development of new and important technology...

 from President Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton
William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton is an American politician who served as the 42nd President of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Inaugurated at age 46, he was the third-youngest president. He took office at the end of the Cold War, and was the first president of the baby boomer generation...

 for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which together have led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age.

Tsutomu Kanai Award

In 1999, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers is a non-profit professional association headquartered in New York City that is dedicated to advancing technological innovation and excellence...

 chose Thompson to receive the first Tsutomu Kanai Award
Tsutomu Kanai Award
The Tsutomu Kanai Award was established in 1997 by a generous endowment from Hitachi Ltd., and named in honor of Dr. Tsutomu Kanai who serves as Hitachi’s president for 30 years...

 for his role in creating the UNIX operating system, which for decades has been a key platform for distributed systems work.

Japan Prize

In 2011 Ken Thompson, along with Dennis Ritchie
Dennis Ritchie
Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie , was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system...

, was awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications
Japan Prize
is awarded to people from all parts of the world whose "original and outstanding achievements in science and technology are recognized as having advanced the frontiers of knowledge and served the cause of peace and prosperity for mankind."- Explanation :...

 for the pioneering work in the development of Unix operating system.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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