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Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson · A.C.Diller, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
Person

Ken Thompson

b. 1943

American programmer and computer scientist, co-creator of the Unix operating system (born 1943)

Born
4 Feb 1943 · New Orleans

Life timeline

Their life from birth to death. On the timeline, world events of the time are shown faintly.

Showing 95 years
  1. 4 Feb 1943BornBorn in New Orleans
  2. 1982AwardIEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award
  3. 1983AwardACM Software System Award
  4. 1983AwardTuring Award
  5. 1990AwardIEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
  6. 1994AwardComputer Pioneer Award
  7. 1997AwardComputer History Museum Fellow
  8. 1998AwardNational Medal of Technology and Innovation
  9. 1999AwardTsutomu Kanai Award
  10. 2003AwardHarold Pender Award
  11. 2011AwardJapan Prize
  12. 2019AwardNational Inventors Hall of Fame
  13. 2020AwardACM Fellow

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Meanwhile in the world

Major world events during their lifetime (1943 – today).

  1. 1945Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
  2. 1945 – 1946Nuremberg trials
  3. 19501950 FIFA World Cup
  4. 1950 – 1953Korean War
  5. 1953 – 1959Cuban Revolution
  6. 19541954 FIFA World Cup
  7. 1955 – 1975Vietnam War
  8. 1956Hungarian Revolution of 1956
  9. 1956Suez Crisis
  10. 19581958 FIFA World Cup
  11. 1959Antarctic Treaty System
  12. 19621962 FIFA World Cup
  13. 1962Cuban Missile Crisis
  14. 19661966 FIFA World Cup
  15. 1966 – 1976Cultural Revolution
  16. 1968Prague Spring
  17. 1969Apollo 11 Moon landing
  18. 19721972 Summer Olympics
  19. 19741974 FIFA World Cup
  20. 19781978 FIFA World Cup
  21. 1978 – 1979Iranian Revolution
  22. 1979 – 1989Soviet–Afghan War
  23. 1980 – 1988Iran–Iraq War
  24. 19841984 Summer Olympics
  25. 1985Schengen Agreement
  26. 19891989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre
  27. 1989Fall of the Berlin Wall
  28. 19901990 FIFA World Cup
  29. 1991Dissolution of the Soviet Union
  30. 19941994 FIFA World Cup
  31. 1994 – 1996First Chechen War
  32. 19981998 FIFA World Cup
  33. 2001 – 2021War in Afghanistan
  34. 2003 – 2011Iraq War
  35. 20042004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami
  36. 20062006 FIFA World Cup
  37. 20082008 Summer Olympics
  38. 2008Russo-Georgian War
  39. 20102010 Haiti earthquake
  40. 2010 – 2012Arab Spring

Biography

Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.

Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go language. In 1983, he won the Turing Award with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie. He is considered one of the greatest computer programmers of all time.

Text from the Wikipedia article Ken Thompson, CC BY-SA 4.0

About this information

Dates and life events come from this person’s Wikidata entry.

We only show events that the sources give a date for. Anything without a date is left out rather than guessed.