Ken Thompson: How a Bored Engineer Built Unix in 3 Weeks and Changed Computing

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In 1969, 26-year-old Bell Labs engineer Ken Thompson wrote the first Unix kernel, shell, editor, and assembler in just three weeks on an old PDP-7 computer, after the Multics operating system project was cancelled. Written entirely in assembly language, this early Unix later inspired Thompson to create language B — a stripped-down version of Martin Richards' BCPL — to make writing utilities faster and more portable. Dennis Ritchie then extended B by adding a type system and data structures, producing the C language in 1972, after which Unix was rewritten in C and became the first portable OS written in a high-level language. Thompson also co-designed UTF-8 on a dinner napkin with Rob Pike, and co-created the Go programming language in 2007, cementing his influence across decades of computing. He and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award in 1983 for their work on Unix, and Thompson received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1998.

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