Contributions

1970s

Thompson, along with Dennis Ritchie collaberated on the creation of the Unix operating system. Thompson wrote the majority of the work, with Ritchie developing the language and I/O systems

1980s

In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie recieved the Turing award for their work on Unix. They further went to develop an os called Plan 9, similar to Unix

1990s

Along with Rob Pike, Thompson developed the UTF-8 encoding, which became the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web

2000s

Thompson now works at Google, as an advisor. Previously he helped design the Go programming language, as a Distinguished Engineer