b. 1943, New Orleans · Co-creator of Unix at Bell Labs; designer of B, UTF-8, and Go
Also known as: Thompson, Kenneth Lane Thompson
Ken Thompson is, with Dennis Ritchie, the co-creator of Unix at Bell Labs in 1969. Much of the shape of modern Linux traces to decisions he and Ritchie made: the hierarchical filesystem, the shell-plus-small-tools model, pipes, regular expressions, and the idea that everything is a file.
He wrote the B language (predecessor of C), the original ed and grep, and co-designed UTF-8 with Rob Pike in 1992. UTF-8 is the default text encoding on Linux.
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Related people: Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Rob Pike, Douglas McIlroy
Works cited in this book:
- The UNIX Time-Sharing System (1974) (with Dennis M. Ritchie)
- Password Security: A Case History (1979) (with Robert Morris)
- Reflections on Trusting Trust (1984)
Discussed in:
- Chapter 2: A History of Unix and Linux · 1969: The Birth of Unix
