Ken Arnold - at Berkeley

At Berkeley

Arnold attended the University of California, Berkeley, after having worked at Lawrence Berkeley computer labs for a year, receiving his A.B. in computer science in 1985. At Berkeley, he was president of the Berkeley Computer Club and the Computer Science Undergraduates Association, and made many contributions to the 2BSD and 4BSD Berkeley Unix distributions, including:

  • curses and termcap: a hardware-independent library for controlling cursor movement, screen editing, and window creation on ASCII display terminals, based on termcap (based on Bill Joy's vi screen control code). Curses was a landmark display library that made it possible for a vast number of new applications to create full-screen user interfaces that were portable between different brands of display terminal.
  • Rogue: Arnold, Michael Toy, and Glenn Wichman co-wrote Rogue, a full-screen role-playing video game that presented a then-novel view of the "dungeon" from above (rather than via textual description as in the older Zork and Adventure). It spawned an entire genre of "roguelike" games.
    • Note that despite occasional confusion on the topic, it was a different Ken Arnold (a "Ken W. Arnold") who contributed to the Ultima game series.
  • fortune: a fortune cookie program. Although Arnold's quote-displaying program was not the first in history, as the BSD standard it became by far the most widely used, and its database of quotes was voluminous. It also standardized a plain-text file format that was philosophically aligned with Unix and thus became widely used both for other fortune programs as well as non-fortune purposes.
  • Other BSD Unix games by Ken Arnold: Cribbage, Hangman, Hunt, Mille Bornes, Monopoly, Robots.
  • Ctags: a very early special-purpose hypertext link generator that essentially turned the vi editor into an IDE. It indexed program objects (such as functions) so that a user of vi (or a clone such as vim) could navigate to an object or function definition from any instance of the object's name elsewhere in the source code.

Additionally, Ken served as both a member of the student senate and its president.

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