Kenneth Lane Thompson, 1983 ACM Turing Award Recipient

This is an oral history interview with Kenneth L. Thompson created in partnership by the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum, in connection with his A.M. Turing Award in 1983. See https://amturing.acm.org/award_winner... for more details. Thompson was interviewed by David C. Brock on 2024-03-15 in The Sea Ranch, CA. Copyright held by Computer History Museum, distributed by permission.
The interview begins with Thompson’s family background and youth, detailing the hobbies he pursued intently from electronics and radio projects, to music, cars, and chess. He describes his experience at the University of California, Berkeley, and his deepening engagement with computers and computer programming there.

The interview then moves to his recruitment to the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and his experience of the Multics project. Thompson next describes his development of Unix and, with Dennis Ritchie, the programming language C. He describes the development of Unix and the Unix community at Bell Labs, and then details his work using Unix for the Number 5 Electronic Switching System. Thompson details his Turing Award lecture, the work on compromised compilers that led to it, and his views on computer security.

Next, he details his career in computer chess and work he did for Bell Labs artist Lillian Schwartz. Thompson describes his work on the Plan 9 operating system at Bell Labs with Rob Pike, and his efforts to create a digital music archive. He then details his post Bell Labs career at Entrisphere and then Google, including his role in Google Books and the creation of the Go programming language.