Re: [9fans] How low can you go?

[Dave Eckhardt <davide+p9@cs.cmu.edu>]

> The author of UREP could certainly have qualified as big brother.

I knew Bob Owens well (he was my undergrad advisor at Penn State).

He was quite a character--he managed to rub many people the wrong
way, but he was also very generous.  JNET, which was big-bucks
commercial RSCS emulation software for VMS, was written from
the UREP code base--as I recall, he gave it to the JNET authors
because they asked him nicely.

He was quite a hacker.  His coding style seemed inexplicably alien
until you realized it was designed around his severe dyslexia.

AT&T donated a pile of 3B2's to the CS department.  They were
running some stuffy System III Unix including a frightening
thing called 3Bnet.  But they came with Blit (5620) terminals,
and somehow the host-side software ran on BSD on our Vax.  I
don't remember whether the first mouse I used was a Sun optical
mouse or the Depraz on the Blit.  Boy, those buttons were nice.

Dave Eckhardt