Contribution - (Full Bio)

Kenneth Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is a computer scientist, notable for his work on the Unix operating system.

Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He received a Bachelor's degree and Master's degree, both in electrical engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1969, while at Bell Labs, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were the principal creators of the Unix operating system. Thompson also wrote the B programming language, a precursor to Dennis Ritchie's C programming language, currently one of the world's most commonly used programming languages. In addition, while writing the Multics operating system, he created the Bon programming language. He also wrote the original standard Unix editor, ed, which was descended from an earlier editor, QED.

Quotes
   * "The X server has to be the biggest program I've ever seen that doesn't do anything for you."
   * "One of my most productive days was throwing away 1000 lines of code."
   * "We have persistent objects, they're called files."
   * "If you want to go somewhere, goto is the best way to get there"
   * "When in doubt, use brute force"
    Quoted from Wikipedia

Related Links

Home Page of Ken Thompson

Unix and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson

Wikipedia

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