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* [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation
@ 2020-07-31  0:03 Kirk McKusick
  2020-07-31  0:26 ` Royce Williams
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 17+ messages in thread
From: Kirk McKusick @ 2020-07-31  0:03 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

The Computer History Museum has an interesting blog post about
Dennis Ritchie's lost dissertation:

https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies-lost-dissertation/

Interesting fact is that Dennis never received his PhD because he failed
to provide a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library.

	Kirk McKusick

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 17+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation
@ 2020-07-31 12:56 Doug McIlroy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 17+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2020-07-31 12:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

> "My graduate school experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to
> be an expert in the theory of algorithms and also that I liked procedural
> languages better than functional ones."
> 
> Amen to that.  Me too, I tried functional languages and my head hurt.  C
> seems so natural to me.

Dennis made quite a generalization from a sample of one--Lisp,
the only functional language that existed when he was in grad
school. I'm sure he'd agree today that functional languages
shine for spplications rooted in algebraic domains. I
immodestly point to www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/powser.html,
which has nothing to do with Unix, but certainly would have
appealed to Dennis.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 17+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's dissertation
@ 2020-08-01 16:44 Doug McIlroy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 17+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2020-08-01 16:44 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

> The use of honorifics was subtly discouraged at the Labs. I never saw a
policy statement, but nobody I knew used "Dr" (except those in the medical
department)

With the sole exception of the president's office, secretaries were
instructed not to say "Dr so-and-so's office" when they picked up an
unanswered phone call. (When that happened you could be sure that
the party you were calling was genuinely unavailable. Part of the
AT&T ethos--now abandoned--was that everybody, right up to the
president, answered their own phones.)

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 17+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation
@ 2020-08-01 21:24 Norman Wilson
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 17+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2020-08-01 21:24 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

John Gilmore:

  Yes -- but [Bell Labs'] administration was anything but egalitarian or
  meritocratic.  I know someone who had immense trouble getting inside the
  door at the Labs because "all" he had was a bachelor's degree.  Let
  their character be judged by how they treated a stranger.

  Sign me proud to have succeeded in life with no degrees at all,

====

That was where local management came in.

I have no degrees at all.  I haven't been nearly as
successful in many ways as John, but I was recruited
and hired by 1127.  That I had no degree meant I was
initially hired as a `special technical assistant'
rather than a `member of technical staff,' but my
department head and director and executive director
(the last was the legendary Vic Vyssotsky) worked
tirelessly on my behalf, without my pushing them at
all, to get me upgraded, and succeeded after I'd been
there about a year.  It was only later that I realized
just how much work they'd done on my behalf.

The upgrade gave me a big raise in pay, but I was
young enough and nerdy enough not to notice.

Within the 1127 culture there was no perceptible
difference; it was very much an egalitarian culture.
I felt respected as an equal from the start (really
from the day and a half I spent interviewing there).

Not every part of the Labs, let alone AT&T, was like
that, especially outside of the Research area.  I
didn't realize it initially but that was one of the
ways I benefited from the success of UNIX (that 1127's
and 112's management could push past such bureaucratic
barriers).

After all, Ken never had more than an MS.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 17+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2020-08-01 21:26 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 17+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-07-31  0:03 [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation Kirk McKusick
2020-07-31  0:26 ` Royce Williams
2020-07-31  0:30 ` Dan Cross
2020-07-31  0:36   ` Rich Morin
2020-08-01  7:14   ` markus schnalke
2020-08-01 14:13     ` Larry McVoy
2020-08-01 15:08       ` John P. Linderman
2020-08-01 16:43         ` Dan Cross
2020-08-01 17:21           ` Ken Thompson via TUHS
2020-08-01 17:34             ` Thomas Paulsen
2020-08-01 17:48           ` John Cowan
2020-08-01 20:24         ` John Gilmore
2020-07-31  0:35 ` Larry McVoy
2020-07-31  0:54   ` John Cowan
2020-07-31 12:56 Doug McIlroy
2020-08-01 16:44 [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's dissertation Doug McIlroy
2020-08-01 21:24 [TUHS] Dennis Ritchie's Dissertation Norman Wilson

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