Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan at VCF East 2019

In the 1960s-1970s, Ken Thompson co-invented the UNIX operating system along with Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs. He also worked on the language B, the operating system Plan 9, and the language Go. He and Ritchie won the Turing Award. He now works at Google. He’ll be interviewed by Brian Kernighan of “K&R” fame.

This talk took place May 4, 2019. Videography courtesy of @thegurumeditation (Facebook), @thegurumeditate (Twitter)

Vintage Computer Federation: https://vcfed.org
VCF Discord:   / discord  

0:00 Start of Video, Introductions and Updates
8:13 Start of Fireside Chat
11:02 How Ken got to Bell Labs
17:25 Origins of UNIX
22:40 Three weeks away from an OS
29:27 The PDP-11
32:48 Pipes
35:42 GREP
38:40 Languages and Evolution
46:25 Chess Computers
1:02:40 End of Chat