Kenneth Lane Thompson was a computer scientist at Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. The Computer History Museum records that he co-created the Unix operating system with Dennis Ritchie in 1969, work that began on a spare DEC PDP-7 computer. Unix grew from that experiment into one of the most widely used systems in the history of computing.
Before C existed, Thompson wrote his own language for the young system. His 1972 Bell Labs memo “Users’ Reference to B” documents the B language, a small, typeless language that he derived from BCPL and that directly preceded C. When Ritchie rewrote Unix in C, the system became, in the museum’s words, “a truly portable operating system capable of running on many different hardware platforms.”
Thompson and Ritchie shared the 1983 ACM Turing Award for their development of operating systems theory and the implementation of Unix. The Computer History Museum also lists his later honors, including the U.S. National Medal of Technology in 1999 and the Japan Prize in 2011.
He is also remembered for a frank view of his craft. The museum quotes him saying, “One of my most productive days was throwing away 1,000 lines of code.” In later decades Thompson helped design the UTF-8 text encoding and co-created the Go programming language, extending an influence that began with a single experimental machine at Bell Labs.