[TUHS] Aleph Null in Software Practice & Experience.

Hi, Alan Glasser wrote: ... Doug has made the letter from him, Bob Morris, and Vic Vyssotsky to Software Practice & Experience which introduces Darwin available at https://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/darwin.pdf. The letter is addressed to C. A. Lang but accompanied by a note that Lang isn't א₀. http://bit-player.org/2013/who-was-aleph-null wonders if א₀ and side-kick Archimedes ‘might have been members of the Bell Labs gang that was so lively and prolific in the late 60s and early 70s’ before acknowledging the Darwin article rules it out. After a false start suspecting Lang, foiled by Doug's PDF of the letter, it goes on to finally identify א₀ as Brit Richard Parkins who explains how it came about on his own page at http://www.zen224037.zen.co.uk/SPE.shtml. Reading the front page of Parkins' site, http://www.zen224037.zen.co.uk, I see he ‘learnt his craft’ by programming assembler when at Cambridge, on the country's first PDP-7 which he was allowed to use by Lang and Neil Wiseman. Unusually, it had a separate graphics processor driving a 1024²-pixel monochrome display. Soon after, Parkins went on to build a graphics card for the Data General Nova which drove a flat screen storage tube before Tektronix released the 4010. The story is buried in http://www.zen224037.zen.co.uk/History.shtml. -- Cheers, Ralph.