Photo of Ken Thompson

Ken Thompson

Biography

Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943) is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-developed the Go language. In 1983, he won the Turing Award with his long-term colleague Dennis Ritchie. He is considered one of the greatest computer programmers of all time.

Bio from Wikipedia

Discography

Records they worked on — most-collected first.

Credited work

21 releases · 5 albums · active 1972–2022

  • Performance · 14
  • Other credits · 7

Studios: Water Music Recorders · Pat Dillett's Studio · Albert Studios

Frequent collaborators

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