2 Aug
2020
2 Aug
'20
1:40 p.m.
My unscientific survey of summer students was that
they either came
from scouts, or were people working on advanced degrees in college.
Not all high-school summer employees were scouts (or scout equivalents -
kids who had logins on BTL Unix machines). I think in particular of Steve
Johnson and Stu Feldman, who eventually became valued permanent employees.
The labs also hired undergrad summer employees. I was one.
Even high-school employees could make lasting contributions. I am
indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
Doug
2 Aug
2 Aug
1:57 p.m.
Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Even high-school employees could make lasting
contributions. I am
indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
Can you give some examples of what this looked like?
Thanks,
Arnold
5:13 p.m.
> Even high-school employees could make lasting
contributions. I am
> indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
> assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
> memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
Can you give some examples of what this looked like?
One useless, but telling, program of mine was a Turing-machine
simulator. Tape cells were represented by macros that contained
a symbol and the (macro) names of adjacent cells. New cells
could be generated as needed, with names derived from a counter.
A natural way to store the state-transition table (I forget
how it was actually done) would be as macros whose names
are the concatenation of state and symbol names.
Path-compression as used in union-find algorithms originated
in a macroprocessor implementation by Bob Morris. Each graph
node was represented by a macro that pointed to or toward
the root of a tree spanning its graph component.
Doug
3 Aug
3 Aug
9:24 a.m.
Doug McIlroy <doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
Thanks Doug.
I have to admit, I didn't really grok this. My mental processes
seem to have frozen somewhat and I need to see something like this
in code before I really understand it. :-)
Thanks,
Arnold
> Even
high-school employees could make lasting contributions. I am
> indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
> assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
> memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
Can you give some examples of what this looked
like?
One useless, but telling, program of mine was a Turing-machine
simulator. Tape cells were represented by macros that contained
a symbol and the (macro) names of adjacent cells. New cells
could be generated as needed, with names derived from a counter.
A natural way to store the state-transition table (I forget
how it was actually done) would be as macros whose names
are the concatenation of state and symbol names.
Path-compression as used in union-find algorithms originated
in a macroprocessor implementation by Bob Morris. Each graph
node was represented by a macro that pointed to or toward
the root of a tree spanning its graph component. 
2 Aug
2 Aug
3:12 p.m.
I was one of those high school employees, but worked year-round on weekends and full time
in the summers into college. I came from the Explorer’s Club (scouts). Walter L. Brown of
the Radiation Physics deptartment hired me mainly as a sysadmin on his lab’s PDP 11/45. (I
still have all the manuals!). I also did some coding for him - one project I remember was
doing some sort of processing of raw data from a magnetometer on the Voyager-1 spacecraft.
I also worked for Steve Bourne re-writing some FORTRAN code into C.
I would use the terminals in the Unix room typing my school papers using troff, printing
them out on the phototypesetter, and presenting them in a Bell Labs white cover. I got to
chat with Brian and Dennis and Doug (hi Doug!) and others often.
I remember having lunch downstairs in the cafeteria and learning to play GO and having
conversations with random employees that blew the mind of this teenager. I remember Steve
Marcus showing me his speech synthesizer and speech recognition system, playing with a
Unix system running in a box the size of a toaster oven, going to talks that mostly went
over my head but still learning a huge amount, wandering those long hallways and peeking
into people’s labs, ogling at the Cray in the computer center, etc.
Those years created a future for me: I worked at AT&T (Long Lines and International)
and Sun Microsystems, and still use Unix every day at Two Sigma (a quantitive hedge fund
with a huge Unix infrastructure).
Not sure I made any lasting contributions, but it left a lasting impression on me.
Rob
On Aug 2, 2020, at 9:42 AM, Doug McIlroy
<doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
My unscientific survey of summer students was that they either came
from scouts, or were people working on advanced degrees in college.
Not all high-school summer employees were scouts (or scout equivalents -
kids who had logins on BTL Unix machines). I think in particular of Steve
Johnson and Stu Feldman, who eventually became valued permanent employees.
The labs also hired undergrad summer employees. I was one.
Even high-school employees could make lasting contributions. I am
indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
Doug 
7:05 p.m.
Robert Diamond writes:
I was one of those high school employees, but worked
year-round on weekends
and full time in the summers into college. I came from the Explorer’s
Club (scouts). Walter L. Brown of the Radiation Physics deptartment hired
me mainly as a sysadmin on his lab’s PDP 11/45. (I still have all the
manuals!). I also did some coding for him - one project I remember was doing
some sort of processing of raw data from a magnetometer on the Voyager-1
spacecraft. I also worked for Steve Bourne re-writing some FORTRAN code
into C.
I would use the terminals in the Unix room typing my school papers using
troff, printing them out on the phototypesetter, and presenting them in
a Bell Labs white cover. I got to chat with Brian and Dennis and Doug
(hi Doug!) and others often.
I remember having lunch downstairs in the cafeteria and learning to play
GO and having conversations with random employees that blew the mind of
this teenager. I remember Steve Marcus showing me his speech synthesizer
and speech recognition system, playing with a Unix system running in a
box the size of a toaster oven, going to talks that mostly went over my
head but still learning a huge amount, wandering those long hallways and
peeking into people’s labs, ogling at the Cray in the computer center, etc.
Those years created a future for me: I worked at AT&T (Long Lines and
International) and Sun Microsystems, and still use Unix every day at Two
Sigma (a quantitive hedge fund with a huge Unix infrastructure).
Not sure I made any lasting contributions, but it left a lasting impression
on me.
Rob
I wasn't claiming to be authoritative on who got to be summer students; it was
just my observation based on who I ran into. I do remember some other kids in
there but not sure how it happened or what became of them; Heinz may know. My
first summer a group of underprivileged kids from Newark was brought in.
It mainly sticks in my mind because one of them was terrified because the
computer was so much smarter than he was, so someone (Hal Alles?) tasked him
with programming a PDP-11/10 via the front panel switches which gave him a
completely different perspective.
My experience as similar to Robert's. Computers were slow in those days, and
so while I was waiting I would wander around and poke my head into doors where
I saw interesting looking stuff and ask people what they were doing. Two that
really stick out to me were discovering the UNIX room, of course, and also
Max Matthew's music lab.
Like Robert, I'm not sure that I did anything timeless but I learned lots of
amazing stuff from some of the smartest and strangest people that I ever met
and it changed my life.
Not sure how it would have played out had I thought about trying to go there
after college. My summer jobs were all software even though I was an EE because
hardware projects couldn't be finished in a summer. I grew up with very
provincial parents in New Jersey and had never really been anywhere until I got
a summer job in 1976 for Tektronix in Oregon. The great outdoors were so much
greater than back east that I never even thought about being anywhere else.
Oh yeah, does anyone have an early 1970s BTL phone book? I've been trying to
remember someone's name. Our lab moved to 7C-217 when buildings 6 and 7 were
completed. Would appreciate it if someone could tell me who else was on that
side of the hall to the right of the lab if facing the lab door from the hall.
I seem to remember that there was another lab that had the SS1, the department
stockroom, and a few more offices including Dave Weller's. I think that our
department's terminal room was across from Dave's. Anyway, would really like
to know the names of the folks in those offices because there's one person that
I wanted to acknowledge in my book, and I've been fixing mistakes for another
printing and would add it if I could.
Jon
3 Aug
3 Aug
5:14 a.m.
On 8/2/2020 12:05 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
I wasn't claiming to be authoritative on who got
to be summer students; it was
just my observation based on who I ran into. I do remember some other kids in
there but not sure how it happened or what became of them; Heinz may know. My
first summer a group of underprivileged kids from Newark was brought in.
It mainly sticks in my mind because one of them was terrified because the
computer was so much smarter than he was, so someone (Hal Alles?) tasked him
with programming a PDP-11/10 via the front panel switches which gave him a
completely different perspective.
Jon, this brings back memories of working with
summer students and
Explorer Scout high schools students (like yourself) during my years
at Bell Labs in MH. I have to credit Carl Christensen for bringing me
in to work with him in helping making computers and training resources
available to Explorer Scouts on Monday evenings shortly after I started
at Bell Labs in 1969. I enjoyed this time in helping and motivating the
students as well as taking them on hiking and spelunking trips in NY.
I had one summer student work for me on the LSX projects. He was so
brilliant that I had a challenge to keep him busy with the tasks I gave
him because he finished them so quickly. One of the motivations
for doing LSX was actually providing a platform for the music synthesizer
that Hal Alles was building.
If I can remember any other names for you I will let you know, but
this was more than 45 years ago ...
Heinz
12:55 p.m.
Students living near MH had a bit of a leg up, having access to the
Explorers (did that include any young women?). Offspring of employees,
particularly executive level employees, seemed to appear quite often. Adam
Buchsbaum and Rich Cox and Terry Crowley come to mind. But, as the names I
remembered demonstrate, they were exceptionally bright, and often became
(valued) regular employees. I share Heinz's recollection about trying to
keep them busy. Terry Crowley joined us as a summer student, and we gave
him the "summer project" of making some improvements (like eliminating the
512-byte record size limit) to /bin/sort. He came back in under a week and
asked "What's next?" -- jpl
On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 1:15 AM Heinz Lycklama <heinz(a)osta.com> wrote:
On 8/2/2020 12:05 PM, Jon Steinhart wrote:
I wasn't claiming to be authoritative on who
got to be summer students;
it was
just my observation based on who I ran into. I
do remember some other
kids in
there but not sure how it happened or what became
of them; Heinz may
know. My
first summer a group of underprivileged kids from
Newark was brought in.
It mainly sticks in my mind because one of them was terrified because the
computer was so much smarter than he was, so someone (Hal Alles?) tasked
him
with programming a PDP-11/10 via the front panel
switches which gave him
a
completely different perspective.
Jon,
this brings back memories of working with summer students and
Explorer Scout high schools students (like yourself) during my years
at Bell Labs in MH. I have to credit Carl Christensen for bringing me
in to work with him in helping making computers and training resources
available to Explorer Scouts on Monday evenings shortly after I started
at Bell Labs in 1969. I enjoyed this time in helping and motivating the
students as well as taking them on hiking and spelunking trips in NY.
I had one summer student work for me on the LSX projects. He was so
brilliant that I had a challenge to keep him busy with the tasks I gave
him because he finished them so quickly. One of the motivations
for doing LSX was actually providing a platform for the music synthesizer
that Hal Alles was building.
If I can remember any other names for you I will let you know, but
this was more than 45 years ago ...
Heinz
4:26 p.m.
Heinz Lycklama writes:
Jon, this brings back memories of working with summer
students and
Explorer Scout high schools students (like yourself) during my years
at Bell Labs in MH. I have to credit Carl Christensen for bringing me
in to work with him in helping making computers and training resources
available to Explorer Scouts on Monday evenings shortly after I started
at Bell Labs in 1969. I enjoyed this time in helping and motivating the
students as well as taking them on hiking and spelunking trips in NY.
I had one summer student work for me on the LSX projects. He was so
brilliant that I had a challenge to keep him busy with the tasks I gave
him because he finished them so quickly. One of the motivations
for doing LSX was actually providing a platform for the music synthesizer
that Hal Alles was building.
Yes, aside from all of the amazing technical stuff, I'm really glad that
you and Carl introduced me to spelunking.
I'm fuzzy on the details on Hal's synthesizer. I thought that he was building
the digital filter stuff for the SS1, and making music was a side-effect that
took on a life of its own. I do remember the really clever keyboard that Dave
Hagelbarger built for it, and the day that Stevie Wonder came to check it out
and the halls were clogged with his admirers.
John P. Linderman writes:
Students living near MH had a bit of a leg up, having
access to the
Explorers (did that include any young women?). Offspring of employees,
particularly executive level employees, seemed to appear quite often. Adam
Buchsbaum and Rich Cox and Terry Crowley come to mind. But, as the names I
remembered demonstrate, they were exceptionally bright, and often became
(valued) regular employees. I share Heinz's recollection about trying to
keep them busy. Terry Crowley joined us as a summer student, and we gave
him the "summer project" of making some improvements (like eliminating the
512-byte record size limit) to /bin/sort. He came back in under a week and
asked "What's next?" -- jpl
There were three young women in scouts when I was there although two of them
(Andrea and Kristen) were daughters of Hans Lie who was an advisor along with
Heinz and Carl.
Living near MH was a mixed blessing. I lived 8 miles away and bicycled there,
uphill both ways. The final daily test was making it up Glenside Road on my
old heavy Raleigh bike. I remember some issues around that; there were no
employee showers at the labs. But, it turned out that dress code was up to
your supervisor and Joe was OK with me wearing shorts. I occasionally had to
explain that to old-timers who would see me in a hall and who thought that
there was a fixed dress code.
Jon
10 Aug
10 Aug
12:48 a.m.
On Sun, 2 Aug 2020, Doug McIlroy wrote:
Even high-school employees could make lasting
contributions. I am
indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
I'd like to see an example or two of that...
Of course, if you want to see macros etc abused, then take a look at the
Obfuscated C Code Contest :-)
-- Dave
12:53 a.m.
On Mon, Aug 10, 2020 at 10:48:00AM +1000, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Sun, 2 Aug 2020, Doug McIlroy wrote:
I don't have any up my sleeve, but I've seen this play out over and
over. Some hot shot young kid shows up, the gray beards say "solve
this impossible problem" and half the time they do. It's pretty cool.
Even high-school employees could make lasting
contributions. I am
indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
I'd like to see an example or two of that... 
6:33 a.m.
Not a summer employee, but an MIT undergrad intern for most of a year,
Alan Snyder was involved with the transition from B to C, suggested the
use of a preprocessor, and the && and || operators. He brought Yacc and
C with him back to MIT and the Dynamic Modeling PDP-10. He wrote a
retargetable C compiler and a host of Unix utilities for ITS. This
confused the rest of the users, who couldn't make sense of the terminal
after AS has logged off. The C language enjoyed a rather modest success
on the ITS operating system; for example the "R" typesetting program and
the Dover printer spooler was written using Snyder's C compiler.
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11 comments
9 participants
participants (9)
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arnold＠skeeve.com -
Dave Horsfall -
Doug McIlroy -
Heinz Lycklama -
John P. Linderman -
Jon Steinhart -
Larry McVoy -
Lars Brinkhoff -
Robert Diamond