I do not know of Ken Thompson. My husband and I got started very early into the tech industry, I know of most of the "founders" not Ken Thompson. We bought our first PC in 1982, my husband was a natural born techie. Dual 5k floppies, 128K memory and a 8 or 9" amber monitor. Once friends and business associates found out we bought a new PC, it was not an IBM, but one of the first clones, everybody wanted one. So we became computer dealers and eventually began building custom high speed pc's all through the late eighties and early nineties.
Our main customers were programmers at Microsoft, no one had a faster machine than ours. We even had it tested at MS labs and they thought it was broken since it finished the routine in 5 minutes compared to others taking more than an hour. That is how we became the go to local computer company for MS top programmers.