Ken Thompson: The Man Who Created Unix, grep, UTF-8 and Go

Overview

This video traces the life of Ken Thompson, the programmer behind Unix, B, regular-expression search, grep, UTF-8 and Go. It follows him from a childhood of building things from scratch through Bell Labs and Google, showing how each tool grew out of a simple wish for the best tools for his own work.

It also answers four questions: why Unix is simple, why C took over the world, where grep came from, and why Go was created.

Key Points

• After Bell Labs pulled out of the over-engineered Multics project and banned OS work, Thompson quietly built a small OS on an underpowered PDP-7. Written in a few weeks while his family was away, the prototype became Unix, built around small tools connected by pipes.
• While improving the QED editor, he turned plain text search into pattern search with regular expressions, an idea from finite automata theory. The editor command g/re/p gave grep its name.
• His B language had no types. Dennis Ritchie added bytes, types such as char and int, and structs, and C was born around 1972. Rewriting Unix in C made it portable; the two won the 1983 Turing Award.
• While working on Plan 9 with Rob Pike, Thompson sketched UTF-8 on a diner napkin. It was implemented overnight and adopted right away.
• At Google, slow C++ builds and the language’s complexity led Thompson, Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer to start Go in 2007, admitting a feature only when all three agreed. Go was open-sourced in 2009.

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro: Does it all trace back to one person?
• 0:17 Who is Ken Thompson?
• 0:38 Four mysteries this video solves
• 1:08 Born in 1943: a childhood of constant moves
• 1:31 The boy who built his own phone line in Japan
• 2:36 Studying electrical engineering at UC Berkeley
• 3:52 1966: Joining Bell Labs
• 6:16 Why he chose the underpowered PDP-7
• 7:31 The Unix prototype, written in three weeks while his family was away
• 9:41 Going back in time: improving the QED text editor
• 10:08 The invention of regular expressions
• 11:05 The birth of grep (Global Regular Expression Print)
• 12:09 The B language, built within a 4 KB limit
• 12:43 Dennis Ritchie adds types and bytes
• 13:12 1972: The birth of C
• 14:54 1983: The Turing Award
• 15:45 Taking on a next-generation OS: Plan 9
• 17:03 UTF-8, born on a diner napkin
• 17:45 Why he left Bell Labs
• 18:18 His first job at Google: Google Books
• 19:22 2007: Three people start planning Go
• 21:14 2009: Go is released as open source
• 21:36 Thompson today: “I hardly write anything but Go”