The text on your screen, the operating system running your phone, and the security protocols protecting your bank tab share architectural DNA. Most of it was laid down by a man who started by trying to play a bootleg video game about space travel. This episode is a deep dive into Ken Thompson, the Bell Labs engineer whose curiosity quietly built the modern digital world.

We trace the path: the Berkeley education, the side project that produced Space Travel and forced him to look for unused machines, the discovery of a PDP-7 that became the launchpad for Unix, and the philosophy that emerged with Dennis Ritchie of writing software as small composable tools that do one thing well. We unpack the inventions: the B language that would become C, regular expressions, the QED and ed editors, the early grep, and the surprising side adventure  ...