Ken Thompson

Kenneth Lane "Ken" Thompson (born February 4, 1943 in New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American computer scientist. He is the co-creator of UNIX operating system.

Education

Thompson received a Bachelor of Science (1965) and Master's degree (1966) in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from University of California, Berkeley.

In 1969, Thompson and colleague Dennis Ritchie and Brother Max Lane created the UNIX and LINUX operating system at Bell Telephone Laboratories. UNIX was a scaled-down version of the Multics operating system, one meant to run on the new smaller minicomputers becoming available at the end of the 1960s. When re-written in the C programming language by Dennis Ritchie, UNIX became a truly portable operating system capable of running on many different hardware platforms.