[TUHS] Bell Labs Sysadmins

Henry Bent: Are there any former Bell Labs sysadmins on this list? My father was the sysadmin for hoh* (Crawford Hill, mostly the radio astronomy folks) in the mid-late '80s and early '90s and I would be especially interested to hear from hou* (Holmdel, what a building!) folks but also ihn* (Indian Hill) and the like. I'm very curious about what life was like on the ground, so to speak. ===== It is worth pointing out that, like many universities, Bell Labs had at least two layers of computing and therefore of sysadmins. There were official central Comp Centers, which is the world Henry asks specifically about; but there were also less-central computing facilities at the divisional and center and department level. I never worked for a comp center, but my role in 1127 was basically that of sysadmin for our center's own systems; the ones used both for our day-to-day computing (including that known to the uucp world as research!) and for OS and other experiments and research and hacking. There were also two large VAXes called alice and rabbit, which afforded general-use computing for other departments in Division 112. Us 1127 sysadmins (I wasn't the only one by any means) ran those too; I don't know the full history but I gather that happened because there was some desire to run the Research version of UNIX rather than the comp-center one for that purpose. One system I had hands in straddled the researcher/comp-center boundary: 3k, the Cray X-MP/24 bought specifically for researchers. It was physically located in the comp center, but managed jointly: it ran Cray's UNICOS but with substantial additions from the Research world, including the stream I/O system (which is rather self-contained so it was not too hard to graft into a different UNIX) and Datakit support (using a custom interface board designed and built by Alan Kaplan and debugged by me and Alan over several late-night sessions. (I remember that the string "feefoefum\n", which is an obscure cultural reference from one of my previous workplaces, was particularly effective at shaking out bugs!) Once UNICOS-a-la-Research was running stably, staff from the Murray Hill Comp Center looked after day-to-day operations, with Research involved more for software support as needed. Norman Wilson Toronto ON