Ken Thompson
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.1 He is considered one of the greatest computer programmers of all time.234
Printed 2026-10-25.
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Footnotes
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“A.M. Turing Award Winners by Year”. amturing.acm.org. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025. ↩
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Naskar, Vivek (Jun 9, 2021). “11 Most Influential & Greatest Programmers Of All Time - The Developer Story”. thedeveloperstory.com. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025. ↩
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Hossain, Md Zakir (Feb 1, 2023). “Top 10 Greatest Programmers in the World of all Time”. Medium. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025. ↩
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“Top Programmers in the World of All Time”. GeeksforGeeks. Sep 26, 2019. Archived from the original on Feb 21, 2025. Retrieved Jan 29, 2025. ↩