Artifact Details

Title

Kernighan, Brian W. oral history

Catalog Number

102740170

Type

Moving image

Description

Toronto native Brian Kernighan moved to Princeton for grad school and while there, got summer jobs at Bell Labs, leading to a permanent position in Computing Research, where Unix was born.

Before Unix and C became widely available, he coauthored “The Elements of Programming Style” to help improve programming generally. In the early 1970s, Fortran 66 was one of the few relatively portable languages, but its control structures were archaic, so he wrote the RATFOR preprocessor to add C-like control structures.

Then he and Bill Plauger rewrote various Unix commands in RATFOR and wrote “Software Tools” so that a broader audience might get access, inspiring the Software Tools Users Group to adopt, port and promote them into other computing environments. Then, by 1978 he and Dennis Ritchie published the still-classic book “The C Programming Language.” He, Bob Fourer and Dave Gay wrote AMPL, a domain-specific language for optimization problems.

With Al Aho and Peter Weinberger, he created the widely-used AWK tool that eased creation of programs to associate actions with patte4rn-matching. He spent much time on text-processing, writing Device Independent Troff (DITROFF), the PIC tool for pictures and the equation preprocessor EQN, with Lorinda Cherry.

By 2000, he had “retired” from Bell Labs into teaching at Princeton, including much effort on making computing comrephensible for non-computing students. He has written much software still in wide use, plus many understandable books and articles.

Date

2017-04-24

Participants

Kernighan, Brian W., Interviewee

Mashey, John R., Interviewer

Publisher

Computer History Museum

Place of Publication

Princeton, CA

Duration

01:14:28

Format

MOV

Credit