[TUHS] mail tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org
Larry McVoy
lm at mcvoy.com
Sat Mar 24 11:54:36 AEST 2018
On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 09:26:29PM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> [TUHS] long lived programs (was Re: RIP John Backus
> > 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
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
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