* Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-28 4:48 ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
@ 2018-11-28 14:44 ` Dan Cross
2018-11-28 17:08 ` Paul Winalski
` (3 subsequent siblings)
4 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Dan Cross @ 2018-11-28 14:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: ken; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
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On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 11:50 PM Ken Thompson via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
> another joe:
>
> echo 1 was a 100 foot balloon that was
> launched into space in the early 60s. this
> was the first satellite that was easily visible
> to the naked eye.
>
> joe wrote a set of fortran programs that
> tracked the orbit of echo and calculated
> the direction to look from a point on earth.
> to do this, he had to learn fortran and
> orbital dynamics.
>
> the programs were used to point antennas
> to send emf from california. bouncing off
> echo and received at bell labs in
> new jersey. thus, thanks to joe, echo was
> the first communications satellite.
>
> by the time i came to bell labs (1966) the
> program, azel, for azimuth/elevation, was
> expanded to track planets, moons, satellites,
> etc. moreover, it tracked the shadow of the
> earth cast by the sun (night). it could predict
> within a few seconds when echo would wink
> on or off as it passed through the shadow.
>
This is an amazing story; thanks for sharing, Ken.
There is an interesting film about project ECHO on youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY8MeZ6lpwI
While it doesn't mention Joe Ossanna directly, there is a small part in the
film where the satellite is located after being launched. Given your story,
one might reasonably assume that that part of the narrative refers
to Ossanna's program, albeit indirectly.
Btw: I've heard that interference detected through the horn antenna at the
Holmdel site lead was explained by cosmic background radiation that was
attributed to the Big Bang; this apparently provided critical observational
evidence that led to the acceptance of the Big Bang theory.
a version of azel was maintained all the time
> i was at bell labs. we used it to predict
> eclipses, transits, occultations etc. when
> we first got a voice synthesizer, the day's
> predictions were spoken at 5pm in case
> there was anything interesting.
>
> anyway, at 5pm on june 8, 1983 the voice
> announced an "occultation of mercury"
> for early the next morning.
>
> no one had heard of such a thing. it was
> extremely rare. mercury had to be at
> about its max elongation; the moon had
> to be only a few hours old (or young);
> it had to be dark; the moon and mercury
> had to be above the horizon; and lastly,
> the moon had to occult mercury.
>
> we all (me, lee mcmahon, dennis ritchie,
> rob pike, and bob morris) frantically tried
> to verify that it was real. it was, but it
> would only be about 5 degrees above
> the horizon facing right into new york city.
> not a chance. we all went home.
>
> later that night we were writing to each
> other and calculating that in an airplane
> at 10,000 feet, the event moved up to 10
> or 15 degrees above the horizon. also,
> in an airplane, we could avoid nyc.
>
> so at 3am, we (me, rob pike, rae mclellan)
> went to the airport equipped with cameras
> and binoculars. we flew north as high as the
> plane would go. we might be the only
> people in the world who have seen an
> occultation of mercury. thank you joe.
>
!! That's neat.
- Dan C.
On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 6:57 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > As a long time roff fan (I still use it, yes, I've learned LaTex, I much
> > prefer roff), I'm hugely bummed that Joe left us so early. I feel like
> > there would be more fun stories, like Ken's story.
> >
> > If I remember correctly, he wrote the first (Unix *) version of roff in
> > PDP-11 assembly, right? Granted, PDP-11 assembly is perhaps the most
> > pleasant assembly ever, but it is still assembly. Roff is a non-trivial
> > program, I can't say that I've every written anything remotely that big
> > in assembly (the only thing I'm proud of is writing swtch() in VAX, 68K,
> > and some other CPU that I can't remember, but that was tiny, hard to get
> > right, but tiny). I've got mad respect for what he did, I feel like the
> > whole roff thing doesn't get enough respect. It wasn't just roff, though
> > that started it, it was pic (I *love* pic), eqn, all the other filters
> > that go down to roff. For lmbench I wrote my own grap like tools
> > because grap wasn't open source.
> >
> > I was talking to Marc Donner, a Morgan Stanley techy (since moved on
> > to google and who knows where) about why I liked roff. At the time
> > I had built webroff which took roff -ms input and made websites.
> > Marc pointed out that the reason I liked roff was, for the most part,
> > it didn't say how to do something (that was buried in the macros),
> > it said what you wanted to do.
> >
> > Ken, if you have more Joe stories I'd love to hear them, I feel like
> > I missed out on a cool person.
> >
> > (*) I know that nroff was "new run off" and it came from somewhere,
> > MIT? Some old system, but it wasn't invented in Unix. That said,
> > I've never seen docs for the previous system and I kinda think Joe
> > took it to the next level. If you haven't studied the docs and
> > written macros, you should. It's a pretty neat system.
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 03:08:36PM -0800, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
> >> joe was much more than that. he knew how
> >> to play the system. example:
> >> out of whole cloth, he invented a form to
> >> order a teletype and opx (bell labs extension)
> >> installed in the home. he then filled out the
> >> form for each of the unix-room dennisons.
> >> there was a phone call from a confused
> >> clerk, and then we all got teletypes and
> >> data sets at home. as an aside, the opx
> >> came with free watts (long distance which
> >> was very expensive in those days.)
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 1:47 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
> wrote:
> >> > We lost J.F. Ossanna on this day in 1977; he had a hand in developing
> Unix,
> >> > and was responsible for "roff" and its descendants. Remember him,
> the next
> >> > time you see "jfo" in Unix documentation.
> >> >
> >> > -- Dave
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-28 4:48 ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
2018-11-28 14:44 ` Dan Cross
@ 2018-11-28 17:08 ` Paul Winalski
2018-11-28 19:03 ` WIlliam Cheswick
2018-11-28 19:04 ` WIlliam Cheswick
2018-11-28 17:57 ` Earl Baugh
` (2 subsequent siblings)
4 siblings, 2 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Paul Winalski @ 2018-11-28 17:08 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Ken Thompson; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
On 11/27/18, Ken Thompson via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:
> another joe:
>
> echo 1 was a 100 foot balloon that was
> launched into space in the early 60s. this
> was the first satellite that was easily visible
> to the naked eye.
>
> joe wrote a set of fortran programs that
> tracked the orbit of echo and calculated
> the direction to look from a point on earth.
> to do this, he had to learn fortran and
> orbital dynamics.
>
> by the time i came to bell labs (1966) the
> program, azel, for azimuth/elevation, was
> expanded to track planets, moons, satellites,
> etc. moreover, it tracked the shadow of the
> earth cast by the sun (night). it could predict
> within a few seconds when echo would wink
> on or off as it passed through the shadow.
>
> a version of azel was maintained all the time
> i was at bell labs. we used it to predict
> eclipses, transits, occultations etc. when
> we first got a voice synthesizer, the day's
> predictions were spoken at 5pm in case
> there was anything interesting.
>
What a great story. There is today a website (heavens-above.com) that
does the same thing as Joe's azel. Amateur Astronomers visit it
regularly to get the night's predictions for visible satellite
transits, visible passes of the International Space Station, etc. I
had no idea the idea went back that far.
-Paul W.
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-28 17:08 ` Paul Winalski
@ 2018-11-28 19:03 ` WIlliam Cheswick
2018-11-28 19:04 ` WIlliam Cheswick
1 sibling, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: WIlliam Cheswick @ 2018-11-28 19:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
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> On Nov 28, 2018, at 12:08 PM, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> a version of azel was maintained all the time
>> i was at bell labs. we used it to predict
>> eclipses, transits, occultations etc. when
>> we first got a voice synthesizer, the day's
>> predictions were spoken at 5pm in case
>> there was anything interesting.
Was this the source or inspiration for astro(1)? Ken’s astro was run daily to announce
things in the Unix room, and in my home up until recently to time turning on the lights in the
evening. (My home still does the Unix-room style astro announcements, but in the morning
at 8:05).
It is available in the Plan 9 for Unix stuff (https://codeload.github.com/9fans/plan9port/zip/master <https://codeload.github.com/9fans/plan9port/zip/master>)
ches
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-28 17:08 ` Paul Winalski
2018-11-28 19:03 ` WIlliam Cheswick
@ 2018-11-28 19:04 ` WIlliam Cheswick
1 sibling, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: WIlliam Cheswick @ 2018-11-28 19:04 UTC (permalink / raw)
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
>Just curious, was that voice synthesizer a votrax or some other thing?
Doug, tell the Disney story!
ches
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-28 4:48 ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
2018-11-28 14:44 ` Dan Cross
2018-11-28 17:08 ` Paul Winalski
@ 2018-11-28 17:57 ` Earl Baugh
2018-11-28 18:23 ` ron minnich
2018-11-29 17:54 ` [TUHS] [OT] azel - was " Toby Thain
4 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Earl Baugh @ 2018-11-28 17:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: ken; +Cc: tuhs
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I don't know if this was just me, but the inner geek in me first thought
was "How did the pictures turn out"? :-)
(the second thought was "Joe is now a hero to me" even thought I didn't
meet him... and this sounds sooo much like what
I've done with other geeky friends in college, etc... ).
An example today, I got a Bluetooth water bottle (as part of a reward for
something at work)
and when I set it up it needed a firmware update, which I thought was cool
(and my wife just rolled her eyes...). :-)
Earl
On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 11:50 PM Ken Thompson via TUHS <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
wrote:
> another joe:
>
> echo 1 was a 100 foot balloon that was
> launched into space in the early 60s. this
> was the first satellite that was easily visible
> to the naked eye.
>
> joe wrote a set of fortran programs that
> tracked the orbit of echo and calculated
> the direction to look from a point on earth.
> to do this, he had to learn fortran and
> orbital dynamics.
>
> the programs were used to point antennas
> to send emf from california. bouncing off
> echo and received at bell labs in
> new jersey. thus, thanks to joe, echo was
> the first communications satellite.
>
> by the time i came to bell labs (1966) the
> program, azel, for azimuth/elevation, was
> expanded to track planets, moons, satellites,
> etc. moreover, it tracked the shadow of the
> earth cast by the sun (night). it could predict
> within a few seconds when echo would wink
> on or off as it passed through the shadow.
>
> a version of azel was maintained all the time
> i was at bell labs. we used it to predict
> eclipses, transits, occultations etc. when
> we first got a voice synthesizer, the day's
> predictions were spoken at 5pm in case
> there was anything interesting.
>
> anyway, at 5pm on june 8, 1983 the voice
> announced an "occultation of mercury"
> for early the next morning.
>
> no one had heard of such a thing. it was
> extremely rare. mercury had to be at
> about its max elongation; the moon had
> to be only a few hours old (or young);
> it had to be dark; the moon and mercury
> had to be above the horizon; and lastly,
> the moon had to occult mercury.
>
> we all (me, lee mcmahon, dennis ritchie,
> rob pike, and bob morris) frantically tried
> to verify that it was real. it was, but it
> would only be about 5 degrees above
> the horizon facing right into new york city.
> not a chance. we all went home.
>
> later that night we were writing to each
> other and calculating that in an airplane
> at 10,000 feet, the event moved up to 10
> or 15 degrees above the horizon. also,
> in an airplane, we could avoid nyc.
>
> so at 3am, we (me, rob pike, rae mclellan)
> went to the airport equipped with cameras
> and binoculars. we flew north as high as the
> plane would go. we might be the only
> people in the world who have seen an
> occultation of mercury. thank you joe.
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 6:57 PM, Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > As a long time roff fan (I still use it, yes, I've learned LaTex, I much
> > prefer roff), I'm hugely bummed that Joe left us so early. I feel like
> > there would be more fun stories, like Ken's story.
> >
> > If I remember correctly, he wrote the first (Unix *) version of roff in
> > PDP-11 assembly, right? Granted, PDP-11 assembly is perhaps the most
> > pleasant assembly ever, but it is still assembly. Roff is a non-trivial
> > program, I can't say that I've every written anything remotely that big
> > in assembly (the only thing I'm proud of is writing swtch() in VAX, 68K,
> > and some other CPU that I can't remember, but that was tiny, hard to get
> > right, but tiny). I've got mad respect for what he did, I feel like the
> > whole roff thing doesn't get enough respect. It wasn't just roff, though
> > that started it, it was pic (I *love* pic), eqn, all the other filters
> > that go down to roff. For lmbench I wrote my own grap like tools
> > because grap wasn't open source.
> >
> > I was talking to Marc Donner, a Morgan Stanley techy (since moved on
> > to google and who knows where) about why I liked roff. At the time
> > I had built webroff which took roff -ms input and made websites.
> > Marc pointed out that the reason I liked roff was, for the most part,
> > it didn't say how to do something (that was buried in the macros),
> > it said what you wanted to do.
> >
> > Ken, if you have more Joe stories I'd love to hear them, I feel like
> > I missed out on a cool person.
> >
> > (*) I know that nroff was "new run off" and it came from somewhere,
> > MIT? Some old system, but it wasn't invented in Unix. That said,
> > I've never seen docs for the previous system and I kinda think Joe
> > took it to the next level. If you haven't studied the docs and
> > written macros, you should. It's a pretty neat system.
> >
> > On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 03:08:36PM -0800, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
> >> joe was much more than that. he knew how
> >> to play the system. example:
> >> out of whole cloth, he invented a form to
> >> order a teletype and opx (bell labs extension)
> >> installed in the home. he then filled out the
> >> form for each of the unix-room dennisons.
> >> there was a phone call from a confused
> >> clerk, and then we all got teletypes and
> >> data sets at home. as an aside, the opx
> >> came with free watts (long distance which
> >> was very expensive in those days.)
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, Nov 27, 2018 at 1:47 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>
> wrote:
> >> > We lost J.F. Ossanna on this day in 1977; he had a hand in developing
> Unix,
> >> > and was responsible for "roff" and its descendants. Remember him,
> the next
> >> > time you see "jfo" in Unix documentation.
> >> >
> >> > -- Dave
> >
> > --
> > ---
> > Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
> http://www.mcvoy.com/lm
>
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^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-28 4:48 ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
` (2 preceding siblings ...)
2018-11-28 17:57 ` Earl Baugh
@ 2018-11-28 18:23 ` ron minnich
2018-11-29 17:54 ` [TUHS] [OT] azel - was " Toby Thain
4 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: ron minnich @ 2018-11-28 18:23 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Ken Thompson; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
Just curious, was that voice synthesizer a votrax or some other thing?
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] [OT] azel - was Re: In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-28 4:48 ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
` (3 preceding siblings ...)
2018-11-28 18:23 ` ron minnich
@ 2018-11-29 17:54 ` Toby Thain
2018-11-29 17:57 ` Warner Losh
[not found] ` <CAG=a+rhvgikmvEPS_Z-umK2XPYfaxHmov_3QZuD0GcE97BN1qw@mail.gmail.com>
4 siblings, 2 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Toby Thain @ 2018-11-29 17:54 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
On 2018-11-27 11:48 PM, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
> ...
> a version of azel was maintained all the time
> i was at bell labs.
As soon as I read this it's been on my mind to ask: Does this program
survive? Presumably it was Fortran? What did it run on?
--Toby
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] [OT] azel - was Re: In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
2018-11-29 17:54 ` [TUHS] [OT] azel - was " Toby Thain
@ 2018-11-29 17:57 ` Warner Losh
[not found] ` <CAG=a+rhvgikmvEPS_Z-umK2XPYfaxHmov_3QZuD0GcE97BN1qw@mail.gmail.com>
1 sibling, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Warner Losh @ 2018-11-29 17:57 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: Toby Thain; +Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society
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On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 10:55 AM Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au>
wrote:
> On 2018-11-27 11:48 PM, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
> > ...
> > a version of azel was maintained all the time
> > i was at bell labs.
>
> As soon as I read this it's been on my mind to ask: Does this program
> survive? Presumably it was Fortran? What did it run on?
>
References to it are in the unix man pages, but the actual program doesn't
seem to be in the extant unix images.
Warner
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[parent not found: <CAG=a+rhvgikmvEPS_Z-umK2XPYfaxHmov_3QZuD0GcE97BN1qw@mail.gmail.com>]
* Re: [TUHS] [OT] azel - was Re: In Memoriam: J.F.Ossanna
[not found] ` <CAG=a+rhvgikmvEPS_Z-umK2XPYfaxHmov_3QZuD0GcE97BN1qw@mail.gmail.com>
@ 2018-11-29 20:11 ` Toby Thain
0 siblings, 0 replies; 16+ messages in thread
From: Toby Thain @ 2018-11-29 20:11 UTC (permalink / raw)
To: TUHS main list
On 2018-11-29 1:04 PM, Ken Thompson wrote:
> its name became astro and it is on the old backup tapes.
> written in c. it has old elements for everything. published
Thanks.
Was it rewritten? Your story has it dating at least back to 1966, which
made me think it might not have been C.
--Toby
> elements are now in a different form and a different time
> base, so it needs updating to bring it into the 21st century.
> if all you want is the earth, moon, and sun, then it might
> be ok. the earth rotation fudge (delta-t) might need to be
> re-estimated to get second accuracy.
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 9:54 AM, Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>> On 2018-11-27 11:48 PM, Ken Thompson via TUHS wrote:
>>> ...
>>> a version of azel was maintained all the time
>>> i was at bell labs.
>>
>> As soon as I read this it's been on my mind to ask: Does this program
>> survive? Presumably it was Fortran? What did it run on?
>>
>> --Toby
>>
>
^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 16+ messages in thread