Ken Thompson

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For the ice hockey player, see Kenneth Thompson.

Kenneth Thompson (born February 4 1943) is a computer scientist, notable for his work on the Unix operating system.

Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He received a BS and MS, both in EECS, from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 and 1966 respectively.

In 1969, while at Bell Labs, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were the principal creators of the Unix operating system. Thompson also wrote the B programming language, a precursor to Dennis Ritchie's C programming language, currently one of the world's most commonly used programming languages. In addition, while writing the Multics operating system, he created the Bon programming language.

In the late 1960s, Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED, which included regular expressions for searching text. This, and Thompson's later editor ed (the default editor on Unix) was very important for the popularity of REs, which were regarded mostly as a tool (or toy) for logicians. Regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs (such as grep). Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson's notation for them.

Somewhat later, while still at Bell Labs, he and Rob Pike were the principal creators of the Plan 9 operating system. During this work, he created the UTF-8 character encoding for use on the Plan 9 operating system.

With J. H. Condon, Thompson was involved in the development of Belle, a chess computer. He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, for all 4, 5, and currently 6-piece endings. Using these so called tablebases, a chess-playing computer program can play perfectly once a position stored in them is reached.

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

Thompson retired from Bell Labs on December 1, 2000, and is currently a fellow at Entrisphere, Inc.

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Turing Award

Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 "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, and is widely considered a seminal computer security work in its own right.

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Quotes

"When in doubt, use brute force"
"We have persistent objects, they're called files."
"One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
"If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there"
"The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you."
"The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking into a neighbor's house."

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