24 Mar
2018
24 Mar
'18
7:54 a.m.
On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 09:26:29PM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
[TUHS] long lived programs (was Re: RIP John Backus
Didn't Roger Faulkner have something to do with that? Or did he come
after?
I ask because Roger and I were friends, so I'm always curious about his
history. How we became friends is some folklore from Sun, it was when
Solaris was a thing so it was SysV based and it had /proc. I had some
question about /proc and I heard Roger was the guy, he was pretty much
directly under me in building 5, I went down and kind of hung out in
his doorway waiting for him to look up. Nothing. 10 minutes later,
nothing, he's staring intently at his screen and working, I might as
well have been invisible.
So I go into his office and sit on his desk.
Without looking up he says something like "who the hell are you and what
do you want?".
"I want to ask you a question"
"And why should I answer?"
"Because I'm going to sit on your desk and belch and fart until you do"
He leaned back, roared with laughter, and we became friends right there.
He's left us, I still miss him. Huge nerd, cared deeply about doing the
right thing in the code.
--lm
Every year someone takes some young hotshot and
points them at some
"impossible" thing and one of them makes it work. I
don't see that
changing.
Case in point.
We hired Tom Killian, a young high-energy physicist disenchanted
with contributing to hundred-author papers. He'd done plenty of
instrument programming, but no operating systems. So, high-energy
as he was, he cooked up an exercise to get his feet wet.
The result: /proc