[TUHS] Questions regarding early Unix contributors

Diomidis Spinellis dds at aueb.gr
Thu Sep 24 19:27:03 AEST 2015


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



More information about the TUHS mailing list