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Kenneth Thompson

By leohattabaugh

  • Birth

    Birth
    Kenneth Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on February 4th, 1943

  • Bachelors Degree

    Bachelors Degree
    In 1965 Ken graduated from the University of California Berkeley with a bachelors degree of science.

  • Masters Degree

    Masters Degree
    In 1966 Ken graduated with a masters degree in electrical engineering and computer science from the University of California, Berkeley.
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    Space Travel

    During his time at Bell Labs ken created the video game named space travel . Space travel was a single player stimulation game that was officially released in 1969.
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    Hired @ Bell Labs

    After receiving his masters he was hired at bell labs. He created the bon programming language while working with Dennis Ritchie on the Multics operating system.

  • UNIX

    UNIX
    In the 70s ken developed the unix operating system, after the first few versions of the software he started to work with Dennis Ritchie to further develop the system.

  • Break & BDE

    In '75 ken took a break from bell labs and went back to UC Berkeley. During his time in Berkeley he installed the 6th version of unix on a PDP-11/70. Berkeley maintained this as their own system under the name BDE (Berkeley Software Distribution).
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    Belle

    Between 1976 and 1980, He collaborated with Joe Condon to create Belle, a champion chess computer. Joe worked on hardware while Ken worked on software.

  • Development

    In the 80s Ken and Dennis worked together to improve the unix system, during this time they developed the 8th, 9th and 10th versions of Unix.

  • Turing Award

    In 1983 ken and Dennis received the Turing award for the development and implementation of the Unix operating system

  • Inferno

    Inferno
    During the 90s ken worked with dennis and coworkers at bell labs to create the inferno operating system which was a research operating system.
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    Three's a Charm

    During the 90's Ken and Dennis received three accolades for their work on the Unix operating system.
    1990-IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal
    1997-Inducted as members into the Computer History Museum
    1999-The 1998 National Medal of Technology was awarded to them by president Bill Clinton.

  • UTF-8

    In 1992 with the help of rob pike, ken created the UTF-8 encoding. This encoding has become the dominant character encoding for the WWW and is accounting for more than half of all web pages.

  • Tsutomu Kanai Award

    In 1999 ken received the first ever Tsutomu Kanai Award for his work on the UNIX operating system

  • Retire from bell labs

    Retire from bell labs
    In the late 2000s ken retired from bell labs, he currently works as a distinguished engineer at Google.