Ken Thompson

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Published Jul 30, 2021Updated Dec 29, 2022
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Ken Thompson, image: Wikimedia Commons

Image by Wikimedia Commons

Ken Thompson (1943 - ) is an American computer scientist, known for creating many significant works in the field, such as the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems, the B (1969) and Go (2019) programming languages, the grep command line utility, and UTF-8 encoding.

Ken Thompson is best known for working alongside Dennis Ritchie and others at Bell Laboratories, where they began working on Unix in 1967 as a replacement operating system for the Digital Equipment Corporation’s PDP-7 mini computer.

During this time, Ken Thompson developed the B programming language, which would become the precursor for the incredibly popular and influential C programming language.

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