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)
During one wet winter at Sea Ranch, these rivers otters were hurrying through our back yard. Actually, the mom was trying to hurry but the pups were not cooperating. The nearest river is the Gualala, about 9 miles north.
I wrote this years ago during a fit of cynicism (happens a lot). However, Silicon Valley has been bery, bery good to me. The Big Stock Option Valley (sung to the tune of The Big Rock Candy Mountains) In the Big Stock Option Valley there's a job that pays alright Where the options grow … Continue reading The Big Stock Option Valley
