Ken Thompson
More info
- Born
- Known for
- Created Unix and the B language, co-created Go
- Awards
- Turing Award 1983
Wrote the first Unix on a cast-off PDP-7 in a month in 1969 — and showed fifteen years later why you cannot trust any compiler.
After Bell Labs withdrew from the failing Multics project, Thompson built a far simpler system on his own. The philosophy — small programs that do one thing and connect through text streams — became Unix and thereby the foundation of Linux, macOS and BSD. He also wrote the B language, C's predecessor, and regular expressions in practical form.
In his 1984 Turing lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust" he described a backdoor placed in the compiler, which inserts itself into every new compiler it builds — invisible in all source code. The conclusion is that you can only trust code compiled with tools you built yourself all the way down. At Google he was one of the designers of Go.