Eighty-two years ago today, on February 4, 1943 (December 30, 1942 in the lunar calendar), Ken Thompson, the father of Unix, was born. Ken Thompson On February 4, 1943, Kenneth Lane Thompson, the father of Unix, Turing Award winner, and academician of the American Academy of Engineering (Kenneth Lane Thompson, commonly known as Ken Thompson, Ken Thompson, February 4, 1943-) was born in New Orleans, USA. In an interview with the book "Programming Life", he recalled that his education in elementary school was terrible, but one class talked about binary. He liked logic since childhood and was immediately fascinated. He did a lot of binary operations and extended to various binary bases with the help of a decimal calculator. By high school, he was addicted to electronics again, making his own radios, oscilloscopes, and amplifiers. In 1960, Ken entered the University of California, Berkeley, as he wished, majoring in electrical engineering. In the second grade, he had the opportunity to use an analog computer, which actually became his exclusive use because no one else grabbed it. Interpreting the program was so slow that he had to program directly in assembly and learned from it what a computer was. Later, on a holiday, he got a list of source codes to interpret the program. Without knowing the language used in the program, he studied it carefully, learned to program, and found a programming job at school. After graduating from undergraduate course in 1965, he had nowhere else to go and stayed in school. A professor applied for a master's degree for him, so he studied for another year. The master's tutor is ElwynBerlekamp, a famous expert in information theory and game theory. Of course, Ken himself recalled that in fact, most of him were self-taught and graduated. Berlekamp is also a legendary figure. His doctoral supervisor is Shannon, Gallager and other masters, and he invented famous algorithms such as Berlekamp, Welch-Berlekamp and Berlekamp-Massey. He spent a lot of time studying games such as Go and was one of the founders of combinatorial game theory. He is also the only professor in the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley without a degree in mathematics. More interestingly, he once co-founded Axcom Trading Advisory Company with his colleagues, and the fund guided by the algorithm he wrote created a miracle of 55% net return. Today, this fund is still in operation. It is Medallion, the oldest subsidiary of the legendary fund company Renaissance (another company founded by mathematics professors). After leaving campus, Thompson joined Bell Labs. In response to the needs of the market, Bell Labs, MIT and General Electric were jointly developing a multi-user time-sharing operating system named Multics. Thompson became one of the developers of this system. While developing Multics, Ken created a programming language called Bon. Unfortunately, because this system not only has a long development cycle and high cost, but also is huge and slow, the market prospect is not optimistic at all, and Bell Labs finally withdrew from this project. This is a huge misfortune for Ken, because a "startravel" game he wrote himself is completely based on Multics. Quitting the Multics project means that Ken will have no machine to play this game anymore. Faced with this situation, Ken's nature as a creator was immediately reflected, so he decided to write his own operating system to meet his needs of playing games. Just do it, Ken found an old PDP-7 that has been abandoned for a long time and rewrote his game on this machine. In the process, Ken had an idea to develop a completely new operating system. Using the assembly language on PDP-7, Ken only spent one month writing the kernel of the operating system. During this month, he completed one kernel, one file system, one editor and one compiler a week. After finishing this system, Ken named it UNiplexedInformationandComputingSystem, abbreviated as UNICS, and later made some changes, UNIX was born. To develop Unix, Ken also developed a new language, namely B language, the predecessor of C language, which is concise and close to hardware language. Although the emergence of Unix was not favored by everyone at first, it attracted the attention of another colleague of Bell Labs, DennisM.Ritchie, so Dennis took the initiative to join in to improve the system together. In 1972, they joined forces to port Unix to the PDP-2, the most advanced mainframe of the time. Because Unix is so simple, stable and efficient, at that time, everyone abandoned the DEC operating system that came with PDP-2 and completely switched to Unix. At this time, Unix had begun to mature. Before 1973, Unix was not well known to the outside world. By October of the same year, Unix was mentioned at a symposium on operating system principles held by IBM. When Ken and Dennis read papers and demonstrated Unix at the meeting, the whole venue was a sensation, and everyone immediately rushed to ask for the program of this new operating system. With the increasing demand for Unix, Ken and Dennis decided to further rewrite Unix so that it can be transplanted to various hardware systems. As many source codes of Unix are assembled and do not have good portability, it happened that Dennis developed C language on the basis of B language in 1973. C language is flexible, efficient, independent of hardware, and does not lose its simplicity. It is the magic weapon needed for Unix transplantation, so the old version of Unix and C language are perfectly combined to produce a new portable Unix system. With the widespread use of Unix, C language also became the most popular programming language at that time, which lasted until Ling. When it comes to Unix and C language, there is another short story. At that time, PDP-11 with Unix installed was placed in Bell Labs for everyone to use. One day, everyone found that Ken could always get the highest permission to easily enter their account. In a place like Bell Labs where experts gather, this was simply too intolerable, so some experts jumped out, carefully analyzed Unix code, found the back door, and then recompiled the whole Unix after modification. It wasn't until many years later that Ken told the whole story. It turned out that there was a backdoor in the code, but it was not in the Unix code, but hidden in the compiler that compiled Unix. Every time the compiler compiled, the backdoor code would be automatically added. At that time, the entire Bell Labs used the C compiler written by Ken. Due to the far-reaching influence of Unix and C language, in 1983, the American Computer Association awarded the Turing Award to Ken and Dennis, who were software engineers, as an exception. In that year, it also decided to set up a new award-the Software System Award to reward those outstanding software developers. Of course, the first software system award belonged to them. After completing such great achievements as Unix, perhaps influenced by his teacher Berlekamp, Ken's interest shifted to computer chess programs, and he developed a special chess computer called Belle, which was invincible all over the world at that time. He also wrote a program to expand the chess endgame library. Ken's career hasn't been smooth sailing either. In the 1980s, with the support of Dennis Ritchie, he cooperated with Rob Pike, Brian Kernighan, Tom Duff, Doug McIlroy, Bjarne Stroustrup, Bruce Ellis and many other experts, and began to invest in the ambitious development of the Plan9 operating system. The purpose of this project is to develop a new generation of distributed multi-user and graphical operating system that can replace Unix. Two official versions were released in 1992 and 1995. However, the rapid development of Linux gradually made Plan9 lose room for growth. In the late 1990s, Lucent canceled its business plan, and Plan9 didn't really get out of the lab in the end. Since then, Lucent has launched the Inferno operating system research project, and Ken has continued to participate in it. This scary-named project (based on Hellfire in The Divine Comedy) includes Dis virtual machine, advanced programming language Limbo and protocol Styx. The first version was released in 1997 and used in Lucent's two products. Moreover, the company has also set up a special business unit. It should be said that it has achieved certain success. However, at this time, with the rise of the Internet, Java developed by Sun became very popular. Lucent is completely unaware that Inferno can actually compete with the Java environment, get a share of the Internet tide, and completely fail in marketing and operation mode. Three years later the Inferno business unit was closed and the intellectual property was sold to British company Vitanuova. In December 2000, Ken officially retired. Later, he worked at Entrisphere, another communication equipment company, with the title of Fellow, until 2006. In September 2007, he joined Google as an outstanding engineer, and once again went out with his old friend RobPike. This time, his task was to design the infrastructure for Google. In an interview with the book "Programming Life", he said that his job is about the operating system and the glue between the various parts. He has the privilege of doing what he wants, and the challenge is to make many unreliable machines work like a reliable multiprocessor machine. Although he is not comfortable with Google's computing environment and related systems (for example, he is not even qualified to submit code), he still enjoys the work here on the whole. In November, 2009, the first achievement of their work was released, which is the Go language that attracted the attention of programmers-a concurrent system language with garbage collection and compilation. To some extent, their work seems to be a continuation of Inferno, and some of the source code of the Go language is directly derived from Inferno. What surprises will there be next? Let's wait and see. Unix has earned Ken numerous honors, including the Turing Award, the U.S. National Technology Award, the IEEET sutomu Kanai Award, and the 2011 Japan International Award ($450,000 in prize) just awarded a few days ago. In addition, Ken invented regular expressions in the process of developing the editor and UTF-8 encoding in the process of developing the Plan9 operating system. These achievements are also worthy of our gratitude. It should be said that KenThompson was lucky. He entered the computer industry because of his interest, and his whole career was almost casual. No wonder he thinks the hallmark of a good developer is enthusiasm. However, one thing may surprise us. He suggested that his son study biology instead of computers, on the grounds that computers are developing too slowly. In 1999, Ken Thompson (left) and Dennis Ritchie won the National Technology Award for developing C language and Unix operating system, and Clinton awarded it. Ken Thompson and Dennis Leach