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Kenneth Thompson (born February 4 1943 ) is a pioneer of Computer Science notable for his contributions to the development of the C Programming Language and the UNIX operating system. Within the computer communities, Thompson is often referred to simply by his first name ''ken''. Thompson is credited, along with Dennis Ritchie , with the creation of C—as of 2006 , the world's most used programming language. BIOGRAPHY Thompson was born in New Orleans , Louisiana , USA . He received a BS in 1965 and MS in 1966, both in EECS , from the University Of California, Berkeley , where his Master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp . ]] In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon Programming Language . The two left the Multics project as it was becoming too complex, but they took the lessons they learned to Bell Labs , where, in 1969 , Thompson and Ritchie were the principal creators of the UNIX Operating System . There, Thompson also wrote the B Programming Language , a precursor to Ritchie's C . Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED , which included Regular Expression s for searching text. QED and Thompson's later editor Ed (the default editor on Unix) contributed greatly to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, previously regarded mostly as a tool (or toy) for Logician s. 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. In the 1980s, Thompson and Rob Pike were the principal creators of the innovative Plan 9 operating system. During this work, he created the UTF-8 Character Encoding for use on Plan 9, currently the most commonly used multi-lingual encoding. 1 He continued working on Plan 9 until he retired from Bell Labs. With Joseph Condon , he created the hardware and software for Belle , 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 so called Tablebase s, a chess-playing computer program can play perfectly once a position stored in them is reached. Thompson's style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements. In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs, and is currently a Fellow at Entrisphere, Inc . AWARDS Turing Award In attack now known as the Thompson hack, and is widely considered a seminal Computer Security work in its own right. National Medal of Technology ]] On April 27 1999 , Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the 1998 National Medal Of Technology from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which together have led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age '' Ritchie and Thompson [to] Get National Medal of Technology '' Bell Labs pre-announcement '' Ritchie and Thompson Receive National Medal of Technology from President Clinton '' Bell Labs press release Tsutomu Kanai Award In 1999 , the Institute Of Electrical And Electronics Engineers chose Thompson to receive the first Tsutomu Kanai Award for his role in creating the UNIX operating system, which for decades has been a key platform for distributed systems work. The award recognizes contributions in the area of distributed computing systems, mainly with the Plan 9 operating system. '' Ken Thompson Receives Kanai Award for Impact of UNIX System '' Bell Labs press release QUOTES
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