Oral History of Brian Kernighan

Interviewed by John R. Mashey on 2017-04-24 in Princeton, CA X8185.2017
© Computer History Museum

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_K...  is useful for more detail.

* Note:  Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - http://www.computerhistory.org/collec...

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Catalog Number: 102740170
Lot Number: X8185.2017