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Ken Thompson Alive

Ken Thompson
KindPerson
Born1943
StatusAlive
Fieldoperating systems
Sourcewww.cs.cmu.edu ↗

Wrote the first Unix on a spare PDP-7, designed B on the way to C, co-invented UTF-8 on a placemat, then co-created Go.

Worked at Bell Labs
Created B Research Unix The UNIX Time-Sharing System Reflections on Trusting Trust Plan 9 from Bell Labs Go

Created Unix (1969), B, UTF-8, Go's foundation, and regular expressions in their modern form — and won the 1983 Turing Award with Ritchie.\n\n'Reflections on Trusting Trust' is his acceptance speech — the most important security paper ever given as a joke.

Sources

  1. cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson