VCF East: Ken Thompson interviewed by Brian Kernighan

Caption notes

Brian Kernighan interviews Ken Thompson at VCF East 2019, moving from his education and arrival at Bell Labs through early Unix, pipes, grep, language evolution and chess machines. Thompson presents the operating system as a sequence of concrete needs: programs to load a disk scheduler led to the need for an editor, assembler and kernel. His account of pipes pairs connecting programs with removing extraneous output so that tools become filters. These are participants’ recollections, including their judgments about timing, contributions and technical choices; the “three weeks” story is not a development benchmark for other teams. Several names and technical terms are corrupted in the captions, so this reading does not reconstruct code, performance figures or a complete chronology from them. The closing account of a chess machine blocked from overseas travel is likewise not independently established attribution of responsibility or a legal conclusion.