24 Sep
2015
24 Sep
'15
9:27 a.m.
I found out that the book "Life with Unix" by Don Libes and Sandy
Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to
fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2].
Working through the list, the following questions came up.
- Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But diction.c first appears
in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley?
- Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of tar the same as
Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}? He
appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at
Berkeley (ex, Pascal). Is this correct?
- Andrew Koenig is credited with varargs. This is a four-line header
file in V7. Did he actually write it?
- Ted Dolotta is credited with the mm macros, but the document "Typing
Documents with MM is written by by D. W. Smith and E. M. Piskorik. Did
its authors only write the documentation? Did Ted Dolotta also write
mmcheck?
Also, I'm missing the login identifiers for the following people. If
anyone remembers them, please send me a note.
Bell Labs, PWB, USG, USDL:
Andrew Koenig
Charles B. Haley
Dick Haight
Greg Chesson
Herb Gellis
Mark Rochkind
Ted Dolotta
BSD:
Bill Reeves
Charles B. Haley
Colin L. Mc Master
Chris Van Wyk
Douglas Lanam
David Willcox
Eric Schienbrood
Earl T. Cohen
Herb Gellis
Ivan Maltz
Juan Porcar
Len Edmondson
Mark Rochkind
Mike Tilson
Olivier Roubine
Peter Honeyman
R. Dowell
Ross Harvey
Robert Toxen
Tom Duff
Ted Dolotta
T. J. Kowalski
Finally, I've summarized all contributions allocated through file path
regular expressions [3] into two tables ordered by author [4]. (The
summary is auto-generated by taking the last significant part of each
path regex.) If you want, please have a look at them and point out
omissions and mistakes.
I will try to commit all responses I receive with appropriate credit to
the repository. (You can also submit a GitHub pull-request, if you prefer.)
[1] https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo
[2]
http://www.dmst.aueb.gr/dds/pubs/conf/2015-MSR-Unix-History/html/Spi15c.pdf
[3]
https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-make/tree/master/src/author-path
[4] http://istlab.dmst.aueb.gr/~dds/contributions.pdf
Diomidis
24 Sep
24 Sep
9:52 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 12:27:03PM +0300, Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
I found out that the book "Life with Unix"
by Don Libes and Sandy
Ressler has a seven page listing of Unix notables, and I'm using that to
fill gaps in the contributors of the Unix history repository [1,2].
Working through the list, the following questions came up.
Wow, Diomidis, I'm reading the Spi15c.pdf paper, great work! Have you
mined the v6.bugs and v7.bugs Usenet postings, as they contain a whole
bunch of patches to these systems and will have names of authors too.
Cheers, Warren
12:59 p.m.
Do you want to know their email addresses for whence they did the work.
Here are some of them
On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 5:27 AM, Diomidis Spinellis <dds(a)aueb.gr> wrote:
Eric Schienbrood
-- "erics" was @ ucbvax.berkeley.edu , although Noel
might remember his MIT moniker
Mike Tilson
-- "mike" was an HRS in Toronto but I think he was
at Unvi. of Toronto or Waterloo before he started his company. Henry
Spencer probably knows for sure.
Peter Honeyman
-- "honey" was all over. I suspect the work is most remember
was at AT&T but he was at Princeton. honey(a)usenix.org will find him
T. J. Kowalski
-- "tjk" was at CMU and AT&T Summit when he wrote
fsck. BTW for those that don't know died two years ago.
1:27 p.m.
I've asked BWK to shed some light.
- Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But
diction.c first appears
in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley?
She was at Bell Labs; I think the Berkeley guys had an underground
pipeline to Bell labs and some stuff got out that way. :-)
(Mary Ann? Care to shed some light?)
BSD:
Chris Van Wyk
Chris Van Wyk definitely was at Bell Labs at some point. He did Ideal,
a preprocessor similar to pic and also wrote an algorithms with C book.
I don't think he was ever at UCB but I don't know.
Mark Rochkind
Here too I think stuff written at ATT got out through Berkeley. (SCCS)
Peter Honeyman
I don't think he was ever at UCB; he was at Bell Labs for a short
time (cf HoneyDanBer UUCP and the V8 /mail file system).
Tom Duff
I believe he was 'td'; I also don't think he was at UCB. He
pingponged a bit between Bell Labs and LucasFilm, I think. Cf the
Plan 9 'rc' shell and the infamous "Duff's Device".
Ted Dolotta
T. J. Kowalski
Also, methinks, a case of UCB releasing stuff written by ATT.
Feel free to take all this with a grain of salt. I was around USENET
in those days, but didn't know any of these people personally; I just
read their documents and USENET postings.
HTH,
Arnold
4:12 p.m.
Diomidis Spinellis scripsit:
- Lorinda Cherry is credited with diction. But
diction.c first appears
in 4BSD and 2.10BSD. Did Lorinda Cherry implement it at Berkeley?
Diction and style were part of Writer's Workbench, a sort of analogue of
PWB for technical writers rather than GE programmers. There were apparently
quite a few others as well. There is now a commercial product called
WWB based on the old software, but running as plugins to MS Word.
--
John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan(a)ccil.org
The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand
on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability.
Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land,
to add something to the extent and the solidity of our possessions.
--Thomas Henry Huxley
5:58 p.m.
On Thu, 24 Sep 2015, Diomidis Spinellis wrote:
- Is Chuck Haley listed in the book as the author of
tar the same as
Charles B. Haley who co-authored V7 usr/doc/{regen,security,setup}? He
appears to have worked both at Bell labs (tar, usr/doc/*) and at
Berkeley (ex, Pascal). Is this correct?
Yes, same. Also see note from Ritchie: "tar was done by C. B. Haley
while he was here at BTL in the research group. This is my memory, and
is confirmed by his web page."
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!search/haley$20tar/alt.folklore.computers…
(I don't see on his webpage though. and the old page isn't on the
wayback machine.)
(I really need to finish my first version of my book. Of the 80+ old BSD
contributors I interviewed, I think he is the only one to tell me he
wasn't interested in participating.)
BSD:
I looked in every passwd related file in my entire archive of all old
BSD releases and don't see any of these. (I have heard from some of them
though.)
Charles B. Haley
The old winfo database (which includes "a miniature
/etc/passwd to speed up user name searches) and its manual has "chuck".
But I see you already have him in the following:
This is awesome.
By the way, a list of the people I contacted from around 4.0 and
earlier is at
http://reedmedia.net/books/bsd-history/tmp-pre-mid-1980-people
If you are curious ...
t1:bsd-history$ wc -l PEOPLE # notes and contact details
8004 PEOPLE
t1:bsd-history$ grep ^== PEOPLE | wc -l
452
t1:bsd-history$ find interviews/ -type f | grep -v my-letters | wc -l
95
t1:bsd-history$ grep bibitem generated/book.bbl | wc -l
221
t1:bsd-history$ grep "\cite{" svn-bsd-history/*tex | wc -l
1282
t1:bsd-history$ grep CITE: svn-bsd-history/*tex | cut -d : -f 2- | sort | uniq | wc -l
190
(left to add bibtex entries for)
3142
days inactive
3142
days old
5 comments
6 participants
participants (6)
-
arnold＠skeeve.com -
Clem Cole -
Diomidis Spinellis -
Jeremy C. Reed -
John Cowan -
Warren Toomey