Kenneth Thompson (born February 4 1943) is a computer science, notable for his work on the Unix operating system.

Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, United States. He received a Bachelor s degree and Master s degree, both in electrical engineering, from the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1969, while at Bell Labs, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were the principal creators of the Unix operating system. Thompson also wrote the B programming language, a precursor to Dennis Ritchie s C programming language, currently one of the world s most commonly used programming languages. In addition, while writing the Multics operating system, he created the Bon programming language.

In the late 1960 s, Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED (text editor), which included regular expressions for searching text. This, and Thompson s later editor Ed (the default editor on Unix) was very important for the popularity of REs, which were regarded mostly as a tool (or toy) for logicians. Regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs (such as Grep). Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson s notation for them.

Somewhat later, while still at Bell Labs, he and Rob Pike were the principal creators of the Plan 9 (operating system) operating system. During this work, he created the UTF-8 character encoding for use on the Plan 9 operating system.

With J. H. Condon, Thompson was involved in the development of Belle (chess machine), a chess computer. He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, for all 4, 5, and currently 6-piece endings. Using these, a chess-playing computer program can play perfectly once a position stored in them is reached.

Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system . Thompson s style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements.

Thompson retired from Bell Labs on December 1, 2000, and is currently a fellow at [http://www.entrisphere.com Entrisphere, Inc].

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