Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson is an American computer scientist who, together with Dennis Ritchie, co-created the Unix operating system at Bell Labs beginning in 1969. Thompson wrote the first version of Unix largely by himself in assembly language for a spare PDP-7 minicomputer, and he designed the B programming language, the direct predecessor Ritchie built on to create C. Thompson also wrote an early and influential computer chess program, and decades later, at Google, he co-designed the Go programming language, released in 2009, aiming to combine the efficiency of a compiled language with simpler, faster software development. He and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 for their development of Unix, and Thompson later received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation in 1998 for his foundational contributions to operating system design.