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Bell Labs researcher Ken Thompson was one of the developers of MULTICS, the ancestor of and inspiration for UNIX. He also developed Space Travel in 1969, arguably one of the first video games, and then ported it from MULTICS to GECOS… and then to a spare PDP-7 that was knocking around the lab, in the process creating a set of development tools that he and the late Dennis Ritchie subsequently turned into an operating system they called UNIX.
He also co-designed and co-wrote Plan 9 from Bell Labs, the better-architected successor to Unix. Plan 9 failed to displace its much more primitive forebear, but it's still being developed today. He then went on to design Plan 9's CPU-independent successor, Inferno. Although Thompson is now 80 years old, he most recently worked at Google, where he co-developed Go… although his hiring caused problems: he refused to take the company's mandatory C proficiency test, on the feeble pretext that he designed the C language.
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