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Thompson is born.
Thompson was born New Orleans. In his early life, he showed interest in programming and general logic. -
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Thompson worked on Regular Expressions
Regular expressions are used to search for text nondeterministic finite automation. They became popular as the standard text editor for Unix. -
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Bachelor and Master's Degree at University of California, Berkely
Thompson completed his Bachelor of Science in 1965 and his Master's Degree in 1966. The field he studied was Electrical and Computer Engineering, and he received his degree from University of California, Berkeley. -
Hired by Bell Labs
In 1966, Thompson was hired by Bell Labs. During his time working in this company during the 60s, Thompson worked on an operating system named Multics with Dennis Ritchie. He also created the Bon programming language. -
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Thompson collaborates with Ritchie in the development of Unix
Throughout the 1970s, Thompson worked with Ritchie on the Unix operating system. Thompson wrote some of the first version of Unix, and Ritchie helped to further develop on them. -
Thompson installs Version 6 Unix on a PDP-11/70
Thompson took a sabbatical from Bell Labs, returned to University of California, Berkeley to install Version 6 Unix on a PDP-11/70. This system continued to be maintained and became Berkeley Software Distribution. -
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Continued revisions were made to Unix
In the 1980s, Thompson and Ritchie worked together and continued to develop and revise Unix. Some changes that were made was the adoption of the BSD codebase for the 8th, 9th, and 10th edition of Unix. -
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Thompson tested early versions of C++
Bjarne Stroustrup created early versions of the C++ programming language, and Thompson tested the language by writing programs using C++. He eventually criticized the language due to incompatibilities. -
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Thompson worked on the Inferno OS
In the 1990s, Thompson worked on the Inferno operating system that was based on a portable virtual machine. He collaborated on this OS with Ritchie and other Bell Labs researchers. -
Thompson develops UTF-8
In 1992, Thompson worked with Rob Pike to develop the UTF-8 encoding scheme. This became the dominant character encoding for the world wide web. -
Retired from Bell Labs
In 2000 Thompson retired from the company Bell Labs. -
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Worked in Entrisphere Inc
Following his retirement from Bell Labs, Thompson worked for Entrisphere Inc. -
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Worked as distinguished engineer at Google
Following his departure from Entrisphere Inc, Thompson became a distinguished engineer at Google. -
Thompson criticizes C++ langauge
In an interview in 2009, Thompson stated, with regard to the C++ language, that "It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive." -
Stated that he now uses a Linux-based OS
In an interview in 2009, Thompson declared that he was now using a Linux-based OS.
