Thompson Ken

Kenneth Thompson

Kenneth Tompson is an engineer, the programmer. It is known as the person who jointly Denis Ritchey made a huge contribution to formation of the Si programming language and development operationally of the UNIX system.

Was born on February 4, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana (USA)

Biography, career

In the childhood Ken Thompson was very playful and disobedient child therefore often was exposed to punishments from parents. It was also characterized by the fact that it undertook a lot of things and nothing was finished.

In 1966 Thompson graduates from the University of California in Berkeley and receives degree of the bachelor and master on electrical equipment. Almost right after the termination of the university Thompson gets a job in research department of Bell Labs company and begins to work on the Multics project — one of the first operating systems.

In 1969 Ken Thompson together with Denis Ritchey developed own OS versyu under the name UNICS which will receive the modern name a bit later - UNIX.

After a release of the first version of UNICS, Ken developed a programming language of Bee (the predecessor of language Si). Bee's language was used for further development of UNIX. But soon, after emergence of Si which developer is in the most part of Ritchey Ken should rewrite UNIX on it.

Quotes

• I understand that we played a role of the main driving force of revolution to scope of computers at that time. but I consider that UNIX was accidental opening.
• I think that the most important and remarkable quality in UNIX consists that in it the clear and simple interface is implemented: open, close, read and write.
• I consider Linux as something that does not belong to Microsoft - it is retaliation against Microsoft, no more no less. I do not think that it is expected by great success.
• By the experience and experience of some of my friends I can tell that Linux is an unreliable system. Microsoft releases not a whisper reliable software products, but Linux the worst of them.

Interesting Facts

• In October, 1983 at the ASM annual conference Dennis Ritchey and Kenneth Thompson from AT & T Bell Laboratories was handed Turing's award for development and implementation of the UNIX operating system.
• In 1999 Thompson got the award Tsutomu of Kanai from Institute of engineers of electrical equipment and IEEE electronics for an outstanding contribution to creation of UNIX.

See Also

Ritchey Denis