KEN THOMPSON designed the revolutionary chess machine Belle, whose chips Deep Blue’s were based on, while working at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, the famous “Idea Factory” that did pioneering work on breakthroughs in everything from solar cells and lasers to transistors and cell phones. Thompson was also the principal inventor of the ubiquitous Unix operating system while there, which is the basis for what runs Apple Macs, Google Android, and the billions of devices and servers running Linux.
