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Kenneth Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on February 4, 1943
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Thompson attended the University of California, Berkeley where he received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
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The following year, Thompson received his master's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley
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After graduation, Kenneth Thompson was hired by Bell Labs to work on the Multics project with Dennis Ritchie.
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Later that year, Thompson also created the Bon programming language during the time he was writing Multics. He also created a video game called Space Travel
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Thompson began to rewrite Space Travel so it could be transported to the PDP-7 after Bell Labs withdrew from the Multics Project.
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Thompson and Richie created and completed an operating system named UNIX.
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Thompson took a break from Bell Labs and went back to UC Berkeley to install the Version 6 Unix on a PDP-11/70. This would then lead to Unix at Berkeley to be its own system, called the Berkeley Software Distribution.
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In 1980, Kenneth Thompson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for designing the UNIX operating system.
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Kenneth Thompson and Dennis Ritchie received the Turing Award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system."
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With the help of Joseph Condon, Thompson created a world champion chess computer called Belle.
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Thompson and Ritchie jointly receive the Richard W. Hamming Medal for "the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language."
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Thompson received the first ever Tsutomu Kanai Award from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his work in developing the UNIX operating system.
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Thompson retired from Bell Labs in 2000. After that he began working at Entrisphere Inc for 6 years. He is now a Distinguished Engineer for Google.
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Thompson worked with Robert Griesemer and Rob Pike to develop the Go programming language and publicly released it in 2009. The latest version was released on February 16, 2017
