How Ken Thompson’s Playful Hacks Forged UNIX, C, and Go

In 1983 the ACM awarded the Turing Award to Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for their development of generic operating systems theory and the implementation of the UNIX operating system.

01 Computer Genius

Born in 1943, Thompson was fascinated by binary numbers in elementary school, excelled academically, and earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley.

02 Joining Bell Labs

After graduate school, Thompson joined Bell Labs, where he worked on the ambitious Multics operating system project alongside Dennis Ritchie. The project suffered from excessive perfectionism, leading Bell Labs to abandon it in 1969.

Disappointed by Multics, Thompson used the experience to develop a new operating system on a PDP‑7, naming it UNiplexed Information and Computing System (UNICS), later shortened to UNIX.

03 UNIX and C Language

UNIX was first presented at an IBM operating‑system symposium in October 1973, causing a sensation. To improve portability, Thompson and Ritchie created the C language, which replaced assembly code in UNIX and became a cornerstone of modern software development.

The design philosophy KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) also emerged during this era.

04 Hackers and Backdoors

Thompson controversially left a backdoor in UNIX, later revealed in his 1983 Turing Award acceptance speech; the vulnerability resided in the C compiler he authored.

Richard Stallman’s definition of a hacker—playful, intelligent, and exploratory—mirrors Thompson’s approach.

05 Google and Go

After retiring from Bell Labs in 2000, Thompson joined Google in 2006, where he co‑designed the Go programming language (Golang) with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer, combining C’s performance with Python‑like development speed.

06 Beyond Coding

Thompson is also an avid aviator, holding a pilot’s license, and has flown various aircraft, including a MiG‑29 in Moscow.

07 Legacy

Beyond UNIX, Thompson contributed to the B programming language (precursor to C), UTF‑8 encoding, the ed text editor, and the Go language. His honors include the IEEE Computer Society Pioneer Award (1994), the U.S. National Medal of Technology (1998), and induction into the Computer History Museum.

His story illustrates how curiosity, playful experimentation, and deep technical skill can drive transformative advances in computing.