Ken Arnold

Kenneth Cutts Richard Cabot Arnold (born 13 June 1958) is an American computer programmer well known as one of the developers of the 1980s dungeon-crawling video game Rogue, for his contributions to the original Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) version of Unix, for his books and articles about C and C++, e.g., his 1980s–1990s UNIX Review column, "The C Advisor", and his high-profile work on the Java platform.

At Berkeley 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. 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. ctags: a program for generating cross-references in computer source code.

Selected bibliography JavaSpaces. Principles, Patterns, and Practice; Eric Freeman, Susanne Hupfer, Ken Arnold; The Java Programming Language; 4th Edition; Ken Arnold, James Gosling, David Holmes; Sample chapter: A Taste of Java's I/O Package: Streams, Files, and So Much More The Jini(TM) Specification, 2nd Edition; Ken Arnold, Jim Waldo and the rest of the Jini technology team. Part of the official Jini Technology Series, published by Addison Wesley. "Fear and Loathing on the UNIX Trail -- Confessions of a Berkeley system mole."; Doug Merritt with Ken Arnold and Bob Toxen; Unix Review, Jan 1985 "Rogue: Where It has Been, Why It Was There, And Why It Shouldn't Have Been There In The First Place"; USENIX Conference Proceedings; Boston, July 1982, p. 139 ff; Ken C.R.C. Arnold, Michael C. Toy