Ken Thompson

Unix's original author, designer of the B language, UTF-8 co-inventor and co-creator of Go.

Specifications & Metrics

era

born 1943

Core Principles & Analysis

• He wrote the first Unix on a scavenged PDP-7 in 1969, to run Space Travel.
• His 1968 QED editor introduced regular expressions to text editing.
• With Rob Pike he co-designed UTF-8 in 1992, on a placemat in a New Jersey diner.