[TUHS] AT&T Research

[scj at yaccman.com]

I think that's an interesting topic.  I interned at BTL for three 
summers before coming on permanently in 1967.  At the time, it was 
running an IBM 7090 (later 7094) with a home-grown operating system.  
Punched card decks were put on mag tape and fed to the system in 
batches.  There was no memory protection, so after running one job the 
system would checksum itself to make sure it was sane.  At one point, 
someone was testing a sort routine that ran amock and sorted a good 
portion of the OS, but not the checksum routine, which did an exclusive 
OR of the instructions and attempted to run the next job.  The 
instruction core dump was quite amusing.

One of the first computer games I became aware of happened on that 
mainframe.  It was called "Darwin", and was a contest.  Each contestant 
submitted a card deck, and there was a monitor that ran the program--its 
object was to attack other programs by returning an address.  If the 
address was protected, you died and the other program reproduced itself 
in your place.  Otherwise, they died and you reproduced yourself.   The 
game ran for several weeks until a program described to me as "all 
teeth, claws and sex organs" proved to be unbeatable.

In my opinion, the initial view of Unix at Bell Labs was quite negative. 
  After all, these were the people who promised Multics with great hype 
and failed to deliver.  When I started work in 1067, I was given a memo 
that began "In six months, we expect the dominant programming language 
at Bell Labs to be PL/1."
There were some amazing simulation programs written in assembler with 
macros -- all of these were lost when the comp center pushed everyone on 
to FORTRAN.

I actually think it was a good thing that Unix in the early days was not 
taken seriously. Having users is a mixed blessing when the rate of 
change was rapid.  For example, the transition from B to C to C with 
strong typing would have driven most application developers bonkers when 
they were trying to serve their customers.

One of the things that got me interested in management was visiting a 
number of groups with my then boss, Eliot Pinson, to try to "sell" Unix. 
  It was amazing to me that some groups that urgently needed it were 
unwilling to try it, while groups that were doing just fine without it 
embraced it and ran with it.  The technical people I met all seemed 
competent -- it must be the management that was the difference...

---


On 2020-07-11 13:30, Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 11:36:35AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>>    https://spinroot.com/pico/watertower.jpg
> 
> So there's a question. Obviously all the anecdotes I've heard about
> Bell Labs have come from Unix people. But there were many others
> working and researching there.
> 
> How was the interaction between the Unix people and the non-Unix people
> at the Labs? Especially when Unix became "big"? Did the non-Unix people
> also pull pranks like the watertower?
> 
> Cheers, Warren