Question 1

True or false: Ken Thompson won the Turing Award alongside Dennis Ritchie for their work on Unix.

Accepted Answer

True. They received the 1983 Turing Award for developing Unix and the C programming language, recognizing their impact on computing.

Question 2

True or false: He wrote the original Unix operating system entirely alone in two weeks.

Accepted Answer

False. Thompson co-created Unix with Dennis Ritchie and others; it was a collaborative effort over several years, not a solo two-week project.

Question 3

True or false: He left Bell Labs to join Microsoft as a key architect for Windows NT.

Accepted Answer

False. Thompson remained at Bell Labs until his retirement in 2000, then worked at Google; he never joined Microsoft or worked on Windows NT.

Question 4

True or false: Thompson was a lead developer of the Google Go programming language in the 2010s.

Accepted Answer

False. While Thompson contributed to Go's design, he was not a lead developer; Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and others were primary creators at Google.

Question 5

True or false: Ken Thompson created the B programming language that directly preceded C.

Accepted Answer

True. Thompson developed B at Bell Labs in 1969, a simplified version of BCPL, which later influenced Dennis Ritchie's creation of C.

Question 6

True or false: He built one of the first fully functional chess-playing programs, Belle, with Joe Condon.

Accepted Answer

True. Thompson co-designed Belle, a chess machine that became the first to achieve master-level play and won the 1980 World Computer Chess Championship.

Question 7

True or false: He introduced the concept of regular expressions into computing through his work on the QED editor.

Accepted Answer

True. Thompson implemented regular expressions in the QED text editor for CTSS in the 1960s, a foundation for tools like grep.

Question 8

True or false: Ken Thompson invented the term 'spaghetti code' to describe poorly structured programs.

Accepted Answer

False. The term 'spaghetti code' predates Thompson's career, originating in the 1970s among programmers, and he is not credited with coining it.

Ken Thompson Trivia Questions