-
Ken Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana
-
Thompson receives his Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley
-
Thompson receives his Masters degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and University of California, Berkeley
-
After graduation, Thompson was hired by Bell Labs
-
when Bell Labs pulled out of the MULTICS project, Thompson began to write his own operating system, mostly because he wanted a system that could run his game on the PDP-7
-
In just a little over a month Thompson wrote , the “shell” which is used to read and follow through commands that are typed into the computer, an editor and an “assembler” which is a program to convert source/machine code than can be directly understood by a computer’s central processing unit.
-
Thompson creates the game Space Travel, which allowed pilots to fly a vehicle around a stimulation of the solar system, be able to view the surroundings, and even land on different planets and their moons.
-
Thompson writes the B programming language, which started out as an effort to improve the existing BCPL (basic combined programming language) language
-
team member Brian Kernighan coined the name a “Unics” which later was shortened to UNIX
-
Thompson and Ritchie (colleague) had goals to use Unix on a much larger machine than the PDP-7. They traded with Bell Labs, the promise of adding text-processing capabilities to Unix for financial support.
-
Unix, the operating system was released by Thompson and his colleagues
-
For the first time, Thompson presented UNIX to his alma mater UCB
-
Thompson returns to the university as a visiting professor while he also assisted in further developing the system.
-
market for Unix systems had expanded enough that industry analysts and researches were now noticing it.
-
Ken Thompson retires from Bell Labs
