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* Re: [TUHS] {TUHS] Interesting Commentary on Unix from Multicians
@ 2022-04-09 11:45 Douglas McIlroy
  2022-04-09 13:09 ` Larry Stewart
                   ` (3 more replies)
  0 siblings, 4 replies; 12+ messages in thread
From: Douglas McIlroy @ 2022-04-09 11:45 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

> Single Level Storage is an awesome concept and removes so many ugly
> hacks from algorithms that otherwise have to process data in files.

This was Vic Vyssotsky's signature contribution to Multics, though in typical
Vyssotsky fashion he never sought personal credit for it. Other awesome
Vyssotsky inventions:

BLODI (block diagram), the first data-flow language, for sample-data systems.

Parallel flow analysis (later reinvented and published  by John Cocke). Vic
installed this in Fortran to produce diagnostics such as, "If the
third branch of IF
statement 15 is ever taken, then variable E will be used before being set".

Darwin, the original game of predation and self-reproduction among programs.
Corewars.org keeps a descendant version going 60 years later.

A minimum-spanning-tree algorithm quite different from the well-known methods
due to his colleagues Bob Prim and Joe Kruskal, again unpublished.

Not long ago on TUHS, Andrew Hume told how Vic found the same isolated bug in
dc by mathematically generating hard cases that Andrew stumbled on by accident,

As you may infer, Vic is one of my personal computing heroes.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 12+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2022-05-11 12:55 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2022-04-09 11:45 [TUHS] {TUHS] Interesting Commentary on Unix from Multicians Douglas McIlroy
2022-04-09 13:09 ` Larry Stewart
2022-04-09 18:25 ` Ken Thompson
2022-04-11 19:24   ` Dan Cross
2022-04-28 21:05 ` Alan Glasser
2022-04-30 10:45   ` [TUHS] Aleph Null in Software Practice & Experience Ralph Corderoy
2022-04-30 15:42     ` John Cowan
2022-04-30 12:52       ` Ralph Corderoy
2022-04-30 13:33         ` Rob Pike
2022-05-02  9:55           ` Ralph Corderoy
2022-05-02 10:03             ` Rob Pike
2022-05-11 12:47 ` [TUHS] {TUHS] Interesting Commentary on Unix from Multicians Joe

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