Thompson, Kenneth Lane

Kenneth Lane Thompson, (born Feb. 4, 1943, New Orleans, La., U.S.), American computer scientist and cowinner of the 1983 A.M. Turing Award, the highest honour in computer science. Thompson and the American computer scientist Dennis M. Ritchie were cited jointly for “their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system,” which they collaborated on at Bell Laboratories.

Thompson earned a bachelor’s degree (1965) and a master’s degree (1966) in electrical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley. After graduation, he went to work at Bell Labs, where he first worked on the Multics operating system (OS). Multics was a time-sharing system funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency and jointly developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and General Electric Co. However, AT&T Corporation (then the parent company of Bell Labs) withdrew from the project and removed its GE computers in 1969.

Thompson had written an electronic game, Space Travel, for Multics, which he wanted to play on Bell Lab’s obsolete Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-7 minicomputer. So he began developing a more flexible OS for the PDP-7. Within a few months, Thompson and Ritchie, who had joined him, had created UNIX, a new OS not completely tied to any particular computer hardware, as earlier systems had been.

In conjunction with the development of UNIX, Thompson, with some help from Ritchie, in 1970 created the B programming language. As they moved their system to a newer PDP-11 minicomputer in 1971, the shortcomings of B became apparent, and Ritchie extended the language over the next year to create the C programming language. C and its family of languages, including C++ and Java, remain among the most widely used computer programming languages. In 1973 Thompson and Ritchie rewrote UNIX in C.

In 1980 Belle, a computer chess program that Thompson had developed with Joseph H. Condon, another engineer at Bell Labs, won the World Computing Chess Championship. That same year, Thompson was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Engineering. In 1983 Thompson was named a fellow by Bell Labs. Thompson also assisted Ritchie in the creation of the Plan 9 (1995) and Inferno (1996) operating systems at Bell Labs. In 1998 Thompson and Ritchie were awarded the U.S. National Medal of Technology for their development of UNIX. Thompson retired from Bell Labs in December 2000.