Kenneth Lane Thompson studied programming languages, operating systems, and computer games. He was one of the inventors of the UNIX operating system, perhaps the most widely used computer system in the world. He also invented the C programming language and co-developed several chess-playing machines.

UNIX is well known for its simplicity, generality, and portability. Thompson conceived of the system in the late 1960s, and together with Dennis Ritchie, a colleague working with him at Bell Laboratories, developed UNIX as an alternative to the old batch programming systems that dominated the industry at the time. Although Thompson created UNIX while working at Bell Labs, the system was developed independently by the two programmers. It was very unusual because it was not commercially marketed like other systems. Instead UNIX gained in popularity through a network of researchers long before it was released commercially, and it has had one of the...