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.

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