[TUHS] Managers/architects (was: AIX moved into maintainance mode)

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Jan 20 03:50:12 AEST 2023


    > From: Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com>

    > At least 30 years ago I said "He's good programmer, a good architect,
    > and a good manager. I've never seen that in one person before".

Corby? Although he was just down the hall from me, I never saw him operating
in any of those roles; maybe some of the old-time Unix people have some
insight. Saltzer is about off-scale in #2; probably good as a manager
(although I had a monumental blow-up with him in the hallway on the 5th
floor, but I was pretty close to unmanageable when I was young ;-); he took
over Athena when it was stumbling, and got it going. Dave Clark is high on
all three - he could manage me! :-)

Bob Taylor? PARC did some _incredibly_ important stuff in his time. Yes, I
know a lot of the credit goes to those under him (Butler Lampson, Alan Kay -
not sure if he was in Taylor's group, Boggs, Metcalfe, etc) but he had to
manage them all. Not sure what his technical role was, though.

Vint Cerf? Again, A1*** as a manager, but had some failings as a architect. I
think the biggest share of the blame for the decision to remove the variable
size addresses from TCP/IP3, and replace them with 32-bit addresses in
TCP/IPv4, goes to him. (Alas, I was down the hall, not in the room, that day;
I wasn't allowed in until the _next_ meeting. I like to think that if I'd been
there, I could/would have pointed out the 'obvious' superior alternative -
'only length 4 must be supported at this time'.)

	Noel

PS: ISTR that about a month ago someone was asking for management papers
from that era (but I was too busy to reply); two good ones are:

  - F. J.  Corbat??, C. T. Clingen, "A Managerial View of the Multics System Development"
	https://multicians.org/managerial.html
  - F. J. Corbat??, C. T. Clingen, and J. H. Saltzer, "Multics -- the first seven years" 
	https://multicians.org/f7y.html


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