Life of Ken Thompson at Bell Labs, co-Inventor of UNIX and language B

UNIX, a multi-user and multi-tasking operating system, the first one of its kind was invented by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and their co-workers in the1960s-1970s at Bell Labs. UNIX was first written in the assembly language and later re-written in C and some part of assembly in it, to continue the evolution of the programming languages.

Ken Thompson rocked the computer world by his great contributions as in inventing the language B, the operating system Plan 9 and the one of the most famous programming languages these days, GO Lang. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.

In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs. He worked at Entrisphere, Inc. as a fellow until 2006 and now works at Google as a Distinguished Engineer.

This is one of the best interview of Ken Thompson recorded by Vintage Computer Federation (VCF) on May 4th, 2019.