KEN THOMPSON

          Hello geeks!! This month’s legend history of the month post is about the person who found the base for the high level programming language. Yes this post is about Ken Thompson the founder of UNIX programming language

Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science. He belongs to New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A. His fields is Computer Science. He had worked in Bell Labs, Entrisphere Inc., Google Inc.,

 Alma mater: University of California, Berkeley. He is well known for Unix B (programming language), Belle (chess machine), UTF-8, Endgame tablebase.

WHAT HE HAD DONE?              

          Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original UNIX operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson works at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.

          Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on computer chess that included creation ofendgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.

          In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language.

          Thompson also developed UTF-8 (a widely used character encoding scheme) together with Rob Pike in 1992.

Along with Joseph Condon, he created the hardware and software for Belle, a world champion chess computer. He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, known as endgame tablebases, for all 4, 5, and 6-piece endings, allowing chess- playing computer programs to make "perfect" moves once a position stored in them is reached. Later, with the help of chess endgame expert John Roycroft, Thompson distributed his first results on CD-ROM.

Notable awardsincludes Turing Award National, Medal of Technology, Tsutomu Kanai Award, IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal and he is fellow of the computer history museum.