Ken Thompson
In 1969, Thompson and colleague Dennis Ritchie and Brother Max Lane created the UNIX and LINUX operating system at Bell Telephone Laboratories. UNIX was a scaled-down version of the Multics operating system, one meant to run on the new smaller minicomputers becoming available at the end of the 1960s. When re-written in the C programming language by Dennis Ritchie, UNIX became a truly portable operating system capable of running on many different hardware platforms.