Ken Thompson rewrote his code in real-time. A federal court said he co-created MP3. So why has no one heard of James D. Johnston?

In 1988, James D. Johnston at Bell Labs and Karlheinz Brandenburg in Germany independently invented perceptual audio coding – the science behind MP3. Brandenburg became famous. Johnston got erased from history. The evidence is wild: Brandenburg worked at Bell Labs with Johnston from 1989-1990 building what became MP3. A federal appeals court explicitly states they "together" created the standard. Ken Thompson – yes, that Ken Thompson – personally rewrote Johnston's PAC codec from Fortran to C in a week after Johnston explained the functions to him in real time, then declared it "vastly superior to MP3." AT&T even had a working iPod competitor in 1998, killed it because "nobody will ever sell music over the internet," and the prototype now sits in the Computer History Museum. I interviewed Johnston and dug through court records, patents, and Brandenburg's own interviews to piece together what actually happened. The IEEE calls Johnston "the father of perceptual audio coding" but almost no one knows his name.