We tried to avoid, you know, records. We were told over and over that was probably the most serious mistake and the reason was the system would never catch on, because we didn't have records.

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National Medal of Technology
On April 27 1999 Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the 1998 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which together have led to enormous advances in computer hardware software and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age. He also invented the B programming language the direct predecessor to the C programming language and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Thompson's style of programming has influenced others notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements.

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 designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.