डेनिस रिचींचा ब्रॉन्क्सव्हिल, न्यू यॉर्क येथे जन्म झाला. भौतिकशास्त्र आणि उपयोजित गणित या विषयात हार्वड विद्यापिठातून पदवी संपादन केल्यानंतर इ.स. १९६७ मध्ये, त्यानी बेल लॅब्जच्या संगणन विज्ञान संशोधन विभागात कार्यारंभ केला.

Thompson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and Master's degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his Master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp.

In the 1960s, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system. While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language. The two left the Multics project as it was becoming too complex, but they took the lessons they learned to Bell Labs, where, in 1969, Thompson and Ritchie were the principal creators of the UNIX operating system. There, Thompson also wrote the B programming language, a precursor to Ritchie's C.

Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED, which included regular expressions for searching text. QED and Thompson's later editor ed (the default editor on Unix) contributed greatly to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, previously regarded mostly as a tool (or toy) for logicians. Regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs (such as grep), and even more modern programming languages like Perl. Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson's notation for them.

Along with Joseph Condon, he created the hardware and software for Belle, a chess computer. He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, for all 4, 5, and 6-piece endings, allowing chess-playing computer programs to make "perfect" moves once a position stored in them is reached. Later, with the help of chess endgame expert John Roycroft, Thompson distributed his first results on CD-ROM.

Thompson's style of programming has influenced others, notably in the terseness of his expressions and a preference for clear statements.

In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs. He worked at Entrisphere, Inc as a fellow until 2006, and now works at Google.

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