The text on your screen, the operating system running your phone, and the security protocols protecting your bank tab share architectural DNA. Most of it was laid down by a man who started by trying to play a bootleg video game about space travel. This episode is a deep dive into Ken Thompson, the Bell Labs engineer whose curiosity quietly built the modern digital world.

We trace the path: the Berkeley education, the side project that produced Space Travel and forced him to look for unused machines, the discovery of a PDP-7 that became the launchpad for Unix, and the philosophy that emerged with Dennis Ritchie of writing software as small composable tools that do one thing well. We unpack the inventions: the B language that would become C, regular expressions, the QED and ed editors, the early grep, and the surprising side adventure of Belle, the chess machine that won a world computer chess championship.

We also cover his Turing Award lecture "Reflections on Trusting Trust," the haunting demonstration that you can plant a backdoor inside a compiler that even a clean source code review will miss, and his more recent collaboration with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer on the Go programming language. Then we cover UTF-8, the elegant 1992 design (one paper napkin, one diner) that solved the encoding mess for the entire global internet. The episode closes with the question Trusting Trust forces: do we now have any choice but to believe a few decades-old codebases on faith?

Subscribe to pplpod for more deep dives into the people who built the modern world. Topics: Ken Thompson, Unix, B language, Bell Labs, Plan 9, Go programming language, UTF-8, Trusting Trust, Turing Award, computer science history.

Source credit: Research for this episode included Wikipedia articles accessed 5/3/2026. Wikipedia text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; content here is summarized/adapted in original wording for commentary and educational use.