The New Orleans Kid Who Built the Internet's Foundation
Kenneth Lane Thompson was born on February 4, 1943, in New Orleans, and he grew up to co-create Unix — the operating system that became the foundation of the modern internet, the backbone of every iPhone, every Android phone, every Mac, every web server, and virtually every piece of critical digital infrastructure on the planet. If you're reading this on any device connected to the internet, you're using technology that traces directly back to Ken Thompson.
Unix
In 1969, Thompson, working at Bell Labs in New Jersey with Dennis Ritchie, created Unix — an operating system designed to be simple, elegant, and portable. At a time when operating systems were massive, complicated, and tied to specific hardware, Unix was a revelation. It was written in a way that could be adapted to run on virtually any computer, and its modular design — small programs that each did one thing well and could be combined to do complex tasks — became the philosophy that shaped all of modern computing.
Thompson also created the B programming language, which Ritchie later developed into C — the programming language that remains one of the most widely used in the world. Between Unix and B/C, Thompson laid the groundwork for essentially everything that followed in the computer revolution.
The Turing Award
In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie received the Turing Award — the Nobel Prize of computer science — for their development of Unix. The citation recognized that their work had "led to the creation of a new era of computing." That is not an overstatement. Linux, the open-source operating system that runs most of the world's servers, is a direct descendant of Unix. macOS and iOS are built on Unix foundations. Android runs on Linux. The entire cloud computing infrastructure — Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure — runs on Unix-derived systems.
Go and Beyond
Thompson didn't stop with Unix. He later co-created the Plan 9 operating system, worked on computer chess (his Belle chess machine won the World Computer Chess Championship), and in the 2000s, while working at Google, co-created the Go programming language — one of the most popular new languages for cloud computing and distributed systems.
The Quiet Revolutionary
Thompson is not a household name the way Steve Jobs or Bill Gates are, but his influence on the modern world is arguably greater. Jobs and Gates built products. Thompson built the foundation that products are built on. Every time someone sends an email, streams a video, loads a website, or makes a phone call on a smartphone, they're using systems that descend from the work Ken Thompson began in 1969.
He was born in New Orleans, a city that has always been better at creating foundational things — jazz, Creole cuisine, the American port system — than at getting credit for them. Ken Thompson created the operating system that runs the world. And most of the world has no idea he exists. That's about as New Orleans as it gets.
Leave a comment
All comments are moderated before being published.
This site is protected by hCaptcha and the hCaptcha Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.