Ken Thompson
Kenneth " Ken " Lane Thompson ( born February 4, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States) is an American computer scientist.
Life
At the University of California at Berkeley, California Thompson holds a degree in electrical engineering. In 1969, he implemented together with his colleague Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs, the first version of the Unix operating system in assembly language. As an anecdote is often told that the true motivation behind the development of Unix was the game Space Travel to port to a PDP -7 little used, since one hours of computing time cost $ 75 on the normal mainframes.
For Unix Thompson wrote, among other things, the first shell ( Thompson shell "sh " ) and the line editor ed He developed the programming language B, a predecessor of the C language, the latter is still one of the world's most widely used programming languages. Later he developed and Rob Pike, also at Bell Labs, the operating plan 9
Taking advice from John Roycroft, he developed programs for the complete analysis of endgames in chess. The results of this work he set up four playoff CDs other at cost price. They were later expelled. With endgame databases can (currently a maximum of seven pieces on the board ) play a playoff perfectly chess program by accessing the necessary information in the data collection. In winning positions it takes ( depending on the goal ) the direct route to Matt or to convert to a won another playoff ( by conversion or hitting a figure ); in loss positions it can delay the loss of the lot as far as possible.
Along with Dennis Ritchie, he received the 1983 Turing Award, the 1990 Richard W. Hamming Medal from the IEEE. 1999 Bill Clinton handed him and Dennis Ritchie, the National Medal of Technology for the development of Unix and C, and 2011 was both the Japan Prize, also awarded for their Unix commitment. In his speech to obtain the Turing Awards Thompson described how he developed a special kind of backdoor. It was a compiler that installs when compiling a Unix login program a stealth back door and also detects when the compiler itself is compiled, so this backdoor unnoticed even in the study of the compiler source code.
Thompson developed in 1992 together with Rob Pike UTF -8, a widely used system for encoding Unicode characters.
Thompson left the Bell Labs on December 1, 2000. Afterwards it was until 2006 a partner at Entrisphere, Inc. and is now working as a respected developer at Google, where he developed the programming language, go together with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer.