About 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. He is considered one of the greatest computer programmers of all time. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language. After initial work on Unix, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and created B, a precursor to Ritchie's C.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.