page_title: Ken Thompson
section_title: 1980s
hierarchical_section_title: Ken Thompson / Career and research / 1980s
caption_attribution_description: English: Plan 9 from Bell Labs, 640x480x8 colour mode, showing acme and drawterm.
context_page_description: Kenneth Lane Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Thompson worked at Bell Labs for most of his career where he designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating system. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.
  Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, and his work on computer chess that included the creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.
context_section_description: Throughout the 1980s, Thompson and Ritchie continued revising Research Unix, which adopted a BSD codebase for the 8th, 9th, and 10th editions. In the mid-1980s, work began at Bell Labs on a new operating system as a replacement for Unix. Thompson was instrumental in the design and implementation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a new operating system utilizing principles of Unix, but applying them more broadly to all major system facilities. Some programs that were part of later versions of Research Unix, such as mk and rc, were also incorporated into Plan 9.
  Thompson tested early versions of the C++ programming language for Bjarne Stroustrup by writing programs in it, but later refused to work in C++ due to frequent incompatibilities between versions. In a 2009 interview, Thompson expressed a negative view of C++, stating, "It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive."
caption: Plan 9 from Bell Labs, running the acme text editor, and the rc shell
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