Kernighan, Brian W.

Kernighan, Brian W.

(1942– ) computer scientist; born in Toronto, Canada. He came to the United States about 1965 and joined Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J., in 1969. He was instrumental in the development of UNIX in the early 1970s, actually giving the operating system its name. He also worked on document preparation software, programming languages (most notably AWK) and software tools.