[TUHS] mail tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org

[lm@mcvoy.com (Larry McVoy)]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2018 at 09:26:29PM -0400, Doug McIlroy wrote:
> [TUHS] long lived programs (was Re: RIP John Backus
> > Every year someone takes some young hotshot and points them at some
> "impossible" thing and one of them makes it work.  I don't see that
> changing.
> 
> Case in point.
> We hired Tom Killian, a young high-energy physicist  disenchanted
> with contributing to hundred-author papers. He'd done plenty of
> instrument programming, but no operating systems. So, high-energy
> as he was, he cooked up an exercise to get his feet wet.
> 
> The result: /proc

Didn't Roger Faulkner have something to do with that?  Or did he come 
after?

I ask because Roger and I were friends, so I'm always curious about his
history.  How we became friends is some folklore from Sun, it was when
Solaris was a thing so it was SysV based and it had /proc.  I had some
question about /proc and I heard Roger was the guy, he was pretty much 
directly under me in building 5, I went down and kind of hung out in
his doorway waiting for him to look up.  Nothing.  10 minutes later,
nothing, he's staring intently at his screen and working, I might as
well have been invisible.

So I go into his office and sit on his desk.

Without looking up he says something like "who the hell are you and what
do you want?".

"I want to ask you a question"

"And why should I answer?"

"Because I'm going to sit on your desk and belch and fart until you do"

He leaned back, roared with laughter, and we became friends right there.

He's left us, I still miss him.  Huge nerd, cared deeply about doing the
right thing in the code.

--lm