CS Debonair

Ken Thompson:

The UNIX environment and the client-server program model were instrumental in
the development of the internet and the reshaping of computing as centered in
networks rather than in individual computers. Development of such an operating system
was mainly due to two people: Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson. We have already seen
a glimpse of dmr in the second edition of the magazine, this article is about Ken
Thompson.

UNIX:

Ken is the most talented programmer the computer industry has ever seen. He wrote UNIX which
changed the history of computing. In 1972, Thompson rewrote the UNIX kernel in C. This was the move
that assured the system's future success, because it made it portable. That is, it enabled UNIX to be
adapted for different platforms (i.e., processor and architecture types) with relative ease, thus breaking
the long-standing practice of tying operating systems to the hardware on which they ran. In order to run
his game on PDP-7, he developed an operating system that occupied only 4 kilobytes of memory. This
design played a vital role in the success of the descendants like Linux. Practical implementations of
hierarchical file system, regular expressions, quicksort, and B (the ancestor of C) are among the things he
brought to the software industry with UNIX. It's been an agreed upon rule in UNIX newsgroups for years,
that ken (all small letters and no last name) means Ken Thompson

B Language:

In an effort to improve the BPCL (Basic Combined Programming Language), Thompson wrote the B
programming language. The most important feature of B is it is the precursor of C language, which is the
most powerful and commonly used programming language even today. It was the insistence of Ken that
kept the C language simple.

The most important feature of B is it is the precursor of C language, which is the most powerful and
commonly used programming language even today. It was the insistence of Ken that kept the C language
simple.

Achievements:

He won the Turing award in1983 for his development of generic operating systems theory and
specifically for the implementation of UNIX. Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the 1998 National
Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C
programming language which together have led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software,
and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American
leadership in the Information Age.

“The act of breaking into a computer system has to have the same social stigma as breaking
into a neighbor's house”
-Ken Thompson

Hemanth SJ
4th Year