[TUHS] {TUHS] Interesting Commentary on Unix from Multicians

[Alan Glasser]

As the labs folks all probably know, Vic became the Executive Director of
division 91(two levels beyond department head).
This was after Research and Multics and, I think, Safeguard.
One of the early things he asked after quizzing various folks about what
was going on in the division was "Where is your source code control
system?".
The question fell to Rudd Canaday (then a department head under Vic).
And SCCS was thus born.

And who doesn't remember SP&E Aleph Null articles?

Alan


On Sat, Apr 9, 2022 at 7:47 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy at dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > Single Level Storage is an awesome concept and removes so many ugly
> > hacks from algorithms that otherwise have to process data in files.
>
> This was Vic Vyssotsky's signature contribution to Multics, though in
> typical
> Vyssotsky fashion he never sought personal credit for it. Other awesome
> Vyssotsky inventions:
>
> BLODI (block diagram), the first data-flow language, for sample-data
> systems.
>
> Parallel flow analysis (later reinvented and published  by John Cocke). Vic
> installed this in Fortran to produce diagnostics such as, "If the
> third branch of IF
> statement 15 is ever taken, then variable E will be used before being set".
>
> Darwin, the original game of predation and self-reproduction among
> programs.
> Corewars.org keeps a descendant version going 60 years later.
>
> A minimum-spanning-tree algorithm quite different from the well-known
> methods
> due to his colleagues Bob Prim and Joe Kruskal, again unpublished.
>
> Not long ago on TUHS, Andrew Hume told how Vic found the same isolated bug
> in
> dc by mathematically generating hard cases that Andrew stumbled on by
> accident,
>
> As you may infer, Vic is one of my personal computing heroes.
>
> Doug
>
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