Ken Thompson
Ken Thompson
(person)In the early days Ken used to hand-cut Unix distributiontapes, often with a note that read "Love, ken". Old-timersstill use his first name (sometimes uncapitalised, becauseit's a login name and mail address) in third-person reference;it is widely understood (on Usenet in particular) thatwithout a last name "Ken" refers only to Ken Thompson.Similarly, Dennis without last name means Dennis Ritchie(and he is often known as dmr).
Ken was first hired to work on the Multics project, whichwas a huge production with many people working on it. Multicswas supposed to support hundreds of on-line logins but couldbarely handle three.
In 1969, when Bell Labs withdrew from the project, Ken got fedup with Multics and went off to write his own operatingsystem. People said "well, if zillions of people wroteMultics, then an OS written by one guy must be Unix!". Therewas some joking about eunichs as well.
Ken's wife Bonnie and son Corey (then 18 months old) went tovisit family in San Diego. Ken spent one week each on thekernel, file system, etc., and finished UNIX in one monthalong with developing SPACEWAR (or was it "Space Travel"?).
See also back door, brute force, demigod, wumpus.