Ken Thompson: The Architect of Unix, "Trusting Trust," and the Go Language
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Show Notes
In this episode of pplpod, we explore the life and legacy of Ken Thompson, an American pioneer of computer science whose work at Bell Labs fundamentally shaped modern computing. We trace his journey from playing the video game Space Travel—which motivated him to rewrite the game on an old PDP-7 and inadvertently invent the Unix operating system—to his modern-day contributions at Google,.
Join us as we discuss Thompson's prolific partnership with Dennis Ritchie, his creation of the B programming language (the predecessor to C), and his critical role in defining the UTF-8 encoding scheme that dominates the World Wide Web today,. We also examine his fascinating work outside of operating systems, including his creation of "perfect" chess endgame tablebases and the world champion chess computer, Belle.
Topics Discussed:
- The Origins of Unix: How a project on a PDP-7 at Bell Labs evolved into the hierarchical file system and command-line interpreter we know today.
- Reflections on Trusting Trust: A look at Thompson's 1983 Turing Award acceptance speech, where he unveiled the "Thompson hack"—a compiler backdoor attack that remains a seminal concept in computer security,.
- Regular Expressions: How Thompson's work on the QED and ed text editors made regular expressions a pervasive tool in text processing.
- The Move to Google: Thompson’s transition to Google, where he co-developed the Go programming language alongside Rob Pike to avoid the "extraneous garbage" of C++,.
- Personal Insights: From his fascination with binary logic in grade school to his switch from Apple products to Raspberry Pi OS,.