The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: scj@yaccman.com
To: Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org>
Cc: tuhs@tuhs.org
Subject: Re: [TUHS] AT&T Research
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 21:13:21 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <03a8a0a84960ca40be4ea04b5cd1d780@yaccman.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <20200711203020.GA1884@minnie.tuhs.org>

I think that's an interesting topic.  I interned at BTL for three 
summers before coming on permanently in 1967.  At the time, it was 
running an IBM 7090 (later 7094) with a home-grown operating system.  
Punched card decks were put on mag tape and fed to the system in 
batches.  There was no memory protection, so after running one job the 
system would checksum itself to make sure it was sane.  At one point, 
someone was testing a sort routine that ran amock and sorted a good 
portion of the OS, but not the checksum routine, which did an exclusive 
OR of the instructions and attempted to run the next job.  The 
instruction core dump was quite amusing.

One of the first computer games I became aware of happened on that 
mainframe.  It was called "Darwin", and was a contest.  Each contestant 
submitted a card deck, and there was a monitor that ran the program--its 
object was to attack other programs by returning an address.  If the 
address was protected, you died and the other program reproduced itself 
in your place.  Otherwise, they died and you reproduced yourself.   The 
game ran for several weeks until a program described to me as "all 
teeth, claws and sex organs" proved to be unbeatable.

In my opinion, the initial view of Unix at Bell Labs was quite negative. 
  After all, these were the people who promised Multics with great hype 
and failed to deliver.  When I started work in 1067, I was given a memo 
that began "In six months, we expect the dominant programming language 
at Bell Labs to be PL/1."
There were some amazing simulation programs written in assembler with 
macros -- all of these were lost when the comp center pushed everyone on 
to FORTRAN.

I actually think it was a good thing that Unix in the early days was not 
taken seriously. Having users is a mixed blessing when the rate of 
change was rapid.  For example, the transition from B to C to C with 
strong typing would have driven most application developers bonkers when 
they were trying to serve their customers.

One of the things that got me interested in management was visiting a 
number of groups with my then boss, Eliot Pinson, to try to "sell" Unix. 
  It was amazing to me that some groups that urgently needed it were 
unwilling to try it, while groups that were doing just fine without it 
embraced it and ran with it.  The technical people I met all seemed 
competent -- it must be the management that was the difference...

---


On 2020-07-11 13:30, Warren Toomey wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 11, 2020 at 11:36:35AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
>>    https://spinroot.com/pico/watertower.jpg
> 
> So there's a question. Obviously all the anecdotes I've heard about
> Bell Labs have come from Unix people. But there were many others
> working and researching there.
> 
> How was the interaction between the Unix people and the non-Unix people
> at the Labs? Especially when Unix became "big"? Did the non-Unix people
> also pull pranks like the watertower?
> 
> Cheers, Warren

  parent reply	other threads:[~2020-07-23  4:23 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 20+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2020-07-11  1:08 John P. Linderman
2020-07-11  1:32 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-11  1:51   ` John P. Linderman
2020-07-11 15:36 ` Clem Cole
2020-07-11 20:30   ` Warren Toomey
2020-07-11 20:36     ` Jon Steinhart
2020-07-11 21:58     ` Rob Pike
2020-07-11 22:29       ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-12  7:55         ` Ed Bradford
2020-07-12  2:22     ` [TUHS] BTL pranks [was AT&T Research] Doug McIlroy
2020-07-12 11:58       ` [TUHS] Monitoring by loudspeaker (was: BTL pranks) Michael Kjörling
2020-07-12 13:25         ` Dan Cross
2020-07-12 14:58         ` Robert Clausecker
2020-07-12 16:09           ` [TUHS] Monitoring by loudspeaker Al Kossow
2020-07-12 20:10             ` [TUHS] Fwd: " Rich Morin
2020-08-23  8:58           ` [TUHS] " Tom Ivar Helbekkmo via TUHS
2020-07-23  4:13     ` scj [this message]
2020-07-23  6:02       ` [TUHS] Technical decisions based on political considerations [was Re: AT&T Research] arnold
2020-07-23 14:42         ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-12 20:38 [TUHS] AT&T Research Norman Wilson

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to=03a8a0a84960ca40be4ea04b5cd1d780@yaccman.com \
    --to=scj@yaccman.com \
    --cc=tuhs@tuhs.org \
    --cc=wkt@tuhs.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).