Ken Thompson

person The principal inventor of the Unix operatingsystem and author of the B language, the predecessor of

C.

In the early days Ken used to hand-cut Unix distribution

tapes, often with a note that read "Love, ken". Old-timers

still use his first name (sometimes uncapitalised, because

it's a login name and mail address) in third-person reference;

it is widely understood (on Usenet in particular) that

without a last name "Ken" refers only to Ken Thompson.

Similarly, Dennis without last name means Dennis Ritchie

(and he is often known as dmr).

Ken was first hired to work on the Multics project, which

was a huge production with many people working on it. Multics

was supposed to support hundreds of on-line logins but could

barely handle three.

In 1969, when Bell Labs withdrew from the project, Ken got fed

up with Multics and went off to write his own operating

system. People said "well, if zillions of people wrote

Multics, then an OS written by one guy must be Unix!". There

was some joking about eunichs as well.

Ken's wife Bonnie and son Corey (then 18 months old) went to

visit family in San Diego. Ken spent one week each on the

kernel, file system, etc., and finished UNIX in one month

along with developing SPACEWAR (or was it "Space Travel"?).

See also back door, brute force, demigod, wumpus.

(1999-01-26)