KEN THOMPSON

In 1969, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie co-developed an interactive time-sharing operating system. They called it UNIX. Unix demonstrated that a relatively small OS could be portable, machine independent, and affordable. The advent of the Unix workstation and the growth of networking have cinched Unix's place in computing. Since the late 1970s, Unix has had a profound impact on DOS, the Mac OS, Windows NT, and many others. In 1970 Thompson authored the B systems language for Unix, the predecessor of C.