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Unit 3 Milestones and Giants in IT Industry

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Kenneth "Ken" Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as Ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of . Having worked at for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix . He also invented the programming language, the direct predecessor to the programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language. In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system."

C Ken and (standing) at Bell Labs, 1972

In the end of 1960s, the young at AT&T Bell Labs Kenneth (Ken) Thompson worked on the project of operating system. Multics (Multiplexing Information and Computer Services) was an experimental operating system for GE-645 mainframe, developed in 1960s by Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Bell Labs, and . It introduced many innovations, but had many problems.

1969 was that magic year in which mankind first went to the moon, ARPANET (the precursor to the ) was launched, UNIX was born, and a number of other interesting events occurred. It was also the year that Thompson wrote the game Space Travel.

In 1969, frustrated by the slow progress and difficulties, Bell Labs withdrew from the MULTICS project and Thompson decided to write his own operating system, in large part because he wanted a decent system on which to run his game, Space Travel, on the PDP-7. On this PDP-7 and using its assembly language, the team of researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, developed a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs. Space Travel, which enabled a pilot to fly a vehicle around a simulation of the solar system, observe the scenery and land on the various planets and their moons, played a greater role in the development of the computer industry than any other Unit 3 Milestones and Giants in IT Industry game.

Thompson, with the help of his colleagues Dennis Ritchie, Douglas McIlroy, and , decided to experiment with some Multics concepts and to redo it on a much smaller scale. Thus in 1969 the idea of now ubiquitous Unix was born.

He spent one week each writing the kernel (i.e., core of the operating system), the shell (which is used to read and run commands that are typed into the computer), an editor and an assembler (a program to convert into machine code that can be directly understood by a computer's CPU).

The PDP-7 on which he developed and first ran his operating system had an 18-bit word length (in contrast to the now nearly universal eight bit word length) and only four kilobytes of memory3 (which is only a small fraction of the capacity of a single modern floppy disk). This extremely small memory was undoubtedly a major factor in Thompson's keeping his operating system extremely small and providing it with an elegant simplicity that has, in turn, played an important role in the great success of it and its various descendants (including ). 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.

In 1973 Thompson made his first public presentation about UNIX. The publication of his paper from that presentation in a prestigious journal the following year gave the system a great deal of visibility in the academic community.

It also led to his return to UCB in 1975, Thompson's alma mater, where he served as a visiting professor into 1976. That university had begun using UNIX, and Thompson wanted to assist it in further developing the system. For Thompson, the benefit was, in addition to the nostalgia, the opportunity to work with a new group of people and the consequent additional intellectual stimulation. This return resulted in UCB becoming one of the two leading developers of UNIX (i.e., along with Bell Labs).

Thompson views the great success of UNIX as being largely a matter of serendipity. But it is also due to the fact that it facilitated the huge paradigm shift from highly centralized mainframe computers to smaller, less expensive and decentralized computers that ran standardized operating systems rather than those dictated by their manufacturers. He views his own success in developing the system to the fact that he is a bottom-up thinker; that is, he visualizes complex systems by initially focusing on their most basic components and how they interact, rather than first focusing on the complete systems.

Thompson, like , the founder of Linux, is another example of history being shaped by the right person being ready at the right time. It is also an example of how a single person with an idea and dedication can accomplish something that eludes large organizations with huge concentrations of talent and massive budgets.

Unit 3 Milestones and Giants in IT Industry

The longevity, reliability, and security of UNIX reflect the excellence of its design as it has been adapted to modern use. Thompson won the ACM Turing Award (1983), the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1999), and the Japan Prize (2011), all with Dennis Ritchie. (888 words) (source: http://www.linfo.org/thompson.html; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Thompson)