In April of 1977, the end of my junior year at Princeton, I applied for a summer intern position with Bell Labs. Bell Labs had a high-volume internship program - lots of people from lots of places going into lots of different departments and locations. I really wanted to get into Center 127 which was … Continue reading My Summer at Bell Labs (part 1)
My office mate for the summer was Bob Mitze, he was working on getting Steve Johnson's portable C compiler working on the AT&T 3B (1 or 2?) computer. Across the hall from us was the inimitable Greg Chesson, rest his soul. Greg was a real networking pioneer and I was fortunate to see him numerous … Continue reading My Summer at Bell Labs (part 2)
When I was a kid, Western New Mexico University in beautiful Silver City, NM hosted an annual affair they called the Computer Symposium. It was open to middle schoolers (7th & up) with kids from El Paso, Albuquerque, Tuscon, and other random western towns. The core of the symposium was a programming contest with winners … Continue reading The W.N.M.U. Computer Symposia
In 1975 Ken Thompson had taken a sabbatical at U.C. Berkeley and catalyzed them into becoming the west coast center of UNIX expertise. While there, he became friends with Denny Koch. Denny went on to get a job with Amdahl Corp. Amdahl was a hot Silicon Valley startup taking on the ogre named IBM, and … Continue reading The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 3)
Joseph, Peter, and I set out to port UNIX to the 370 running VM/370. We had a running UNIX system on the PDP-11/45, complete with source code, so that was the obvious place to do development - we would cross-compile from PDP to 370 and then test on the 370. I don't remember the exact … Continue reading The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 2)
When I was a freshman at Princeton University in the 1974-75 school year the computer center hosted, for the state of New Jersey educational system, an IBM System/370 Model 158 running the marvelously interactive APL\360 system. It shared a room with Princeton's System/360 Model 91 which was an amazing beast but only ran batch jobs. … Continue reading The Roots of UNIX for the IBM Mainframe (part 1)
