High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4, 1943), commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles, is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson is notable for his work with the B programming language (basing it mainly on the BCPL language he had used to write Unix while in the MULTICS project), the C programming language, and as one of the creators and early developers of the Unix and Plan 9 operating systems.