Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J. F. Ossanna

Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J. F. Ossanna

[Doug McIlroy]

> Joe sold the (not really existent) UNIX system to the patent department of AT&T,
> which in turn bought the urgently needed PDP11. Without that there would be no
> UNIX. Without Joe there would be no UNIX.

That one's an urban legend. The PDP-11 was indeed a gift from another department,
thanks to a year-end budget surplus. Unix was up and running on that machine when
Joe corralled the patent department.

Nevertheless the story is consistent with Joe's talent for playing (or skirting)
the system to get things done. After Joe, the talent resurfaced in the
person of Fred Grampp. Lots of tales await Grampp's popping up from Dave
Horsford's calendar.

> Runoff was moved to Multics fairly early: here's its entry from the Multics
> glossary: "A Multics BCPL version of runoff was written by Doug McIlroy
> and Bob  Morris."

Morris did one port and called it roff. I did the BCPL one, adding registers,
but not macros. Molly Wagner contributed a hyphenation algorithm. Ken
and/or Dennis redid roff in PDP-11 assembler. Joe started afresh for the
grander nroff, including macros. Then Joe bought a phototypesetter ...

> Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the time ... I wanted to go there and had
> to work at it a bit but I got there. Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that?

Yes, in desirability. But Bell Labs had far more diverse interests. Telephones,
theoretical physics, submarine cables, music, speech, fiber optics, Apollo.
Wahtever you wanted to know or work on, you were likely to find kindred
types and willing management.

> was that voice synthesizer a votrax or some other thing?

Yes. Credit Joe again. He had a penchant for hooking up novel equipment.
When the Votrax arrived, its output was made accessible by phone and also
by loudspeaker in the Unix lab. You had to feed it a stream of ASCII-
encoded phonemes. Lee McMahon promptly became adept at writing them
down. After a couple of days' play in the lab, Lee was working in his
office with the Votrax on speakerphone in the background. Giving no
notice, he typed the phonemes for "It sounds better over the telephone".
Everyone in the lab heard it clearly--our own "Watson, come here" moment.

But phonemes are tedious. Believing that it could ease the
task of phonetic transcription, I wrote a phonics program, "speak",
through which you could feed English text for conversion to
phonemes. At speak's inaugural run, Bob Morris typed one word,
"oarlock", and pronounced the program a success. Luckily he didn't
try "coworker", which the program would have rendered as "cow orker".
Max Matthews from acoustics research called it a breakthrough.
The acoustics folks could synthesize much better speech, but it
took minutes of computing to synthesize seconds of sounds. So
the Unix lab heard more synthetic speech in a few days than the
experts had created over all time.

One thing we learned is that people quickly get used
to poor synthetic speech just like they get used to
foreign accents. In fact, non-native speakers opined
that the Votrax was easier to understand than real people,
probably due to the bit of silence that the speak program
inserted between words to help with mental segmentation.
One evening someone in the Unix room playing with the
synthesizer noticed a night janitor listening in from
the corridor. In a questionable abuse of a non-exempt
employee, the Unix person typed, "Stop hanging around
around and get back to work." The poor janitor fled.

AT&T installed speak for the public to play with at Epcot.
Worried that folks would enter bad words that everybody
standing around could hear, they asked if I could filter them
out. Sure, I said, just provide me with a list of what to
delete. Duly, I received on letterhead from the VP for
public relations a list of perhaps twenty bad words. (I have
always wondered about the politics of asking a secretary to
type that letter.) It was reported that girls would try the
machine on people's names, while boys would discover that
the machine "didn't know" bad words (though it would happily
pronounce phonetic misspellings). Alas, I mistakenly discarded
the infamous letter in cleaning house to leave Bell Labs.

Doug

Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J. F. Ossanna

[Eric Wayte]

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http://www.lostepcot.com/communicore.html - there's a description of
Phraser, which was the name given to speak at EPCOT.  I remember playing
with it, and getting it to say bad words!

On Thu, Nov 29, 2018 at 12:08 PM Doug McIlroy <doug@cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:

> > Joe sold the (not really existent) UNIX system to the patent department
> of AT&T,
> > which in turn bought the urgently needed PDP11. Without that there would
> be no
> > UNIX. Without Joe there would be no UNIX.
>
> That one's an urban legend. The PDP-11 was indeed a gift from another
> department,
> thanks to a year-end budget surplus. Unix was up and running on that
> machine when
> Joe corralled the patent department.
>
> Nevertheless the story is consistent with Joe's talent for playing (or
> skirting)
> the system to get things done. After Joe, the talent resurfaced in the
> person of Fred Grampp. Lots of tales await Grampp's popping up from Dave
> Horsford's calendar.
>
> > Runoff was moved to Multics fairly early: here's its entry from the
> Multics
> > glossary: "A Multics BCPL version of runoff was written by Doug McIlroy
> > and Bob  Morris."
>
> Morris did one port and called it roff. I did the BCPL one, adding
> registers,
> but not macros. Molly Wagner contributed a hyphenation algorithm. Ken
> and/or Dennis redid roff in PDP-11 assembler. Joe started afresh for the
> grander nroff, including macros. Then Joe bought a phototypesetter ...
>
> > Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the time ... I wanted to go there and
> had
> > to work at it a bit but I got there. Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that?
>
> Yes, in desirability. But Bell Labs had far more diverse interests.
> Telephones,
> theoretical physics, submarine cables, music, speech, fiber optics, Apollo.
> Wahtever you wanted to know or work on, you were likely to find kindred
> types and willing management.
>
> > was that voice synthesizer a votrax or some other thing?
>
> Yes. Credit Joe again. He had a penchant for hooking up novel equipment.
> When the Votrax arrived, its output was made accessible by phone and also
> by loudspeaker in the Unix lab. You had to feed it a stream of ASCII-
> encoded phonemes. Lee McMahon promptly became adept at writing them
> down. After a couple of days' play in the lab, Lee was working in his
> office with the Votrax on speakerphone in the background. Giving no
> notice, he typed the phonemes for "It sounds better over the telephone".
> Everyone in the lab heard it clearly--our own "Watson, come here" moment.
>
> But phonemes are tedious. Believing that it could ease the
> task of phonetic transcription, I wrote a phonics program, "speak",
> through which you could feed English text for conversion to
> phonemes. At speak's inaugural run, Bob Morris typed one word,
> "oarlock", and pronounced the program a success. Luckily he didn't
> try "coworker", which the program would have rendered as "cow orker".
> Max Matthews from acoustics research called it a breakthrough.
> The acoustics folks could synthesize much better speech, but it
> took minutes of computing to synthesize seconds of sounds. So
> the Unix lab heard more synthetic speech in a few days than the
> experts had created over all time.
>
> One thing we learned is that people quickly get used
> to poor synthetic speech just like they get used to
> foreign accents. In fact, non-native speakers opined
> that the Votrax was easier to understand than real people,
> probably due to the bit of silence that the speak program
> inserted between words to help with mental segmentation.
> One evening someone in the Unix room playing with the
> synthesizer noticed a night janitor listening in from
> the corridor. In a questionable abuse of a non-exempt
> employee, the Unix person typed, "Stop hanging around
> around and get back to work." The poor janitor fled.
>
> AT&T installed speak for the public to play with at Epcot.
> Worried that folks would enter bad words that everybody
> standing around could hear, they asked if I could filter them
> out. Sure, I said, just provide me with a list of what to
> delete. Duly, I received on letterhead from the VP for
> public relations a list of perhaps twenty bad words. (I have
> always wondered about the politics of asking a secretary to
> type that letter.) It was reported that girls would try the
> machine on people's names, while boys would discover that
> the machine "didn't know" bad words (though it would happily
> pronounce phonetic misspellings). Alas, I mistakenly discarded
> the infamous letter in cleaning house to leave Bell Labs.
>
> Doug
>
>

-- 
Eric Wayte

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Re: [TUHS] In Memoriam: J. F. Ossanna

[Arthur Krewat]

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On 11/29/2018 12:07 PM, Doug McIlroy wrote:
>> Sun was sort of the Bell Labs of the time ... I wanted to go there and had
>> to work at it a bit but I got there. Was Bell Labs in the 60's like that?
> Yes, in desirability. But Bell Labs had far more diverse interests. Telephones,
> theoretical physics, submarine cables, music, speech, fiber optics, Apollo.
> Wahtever you wanted to know or work on, you were likely to find kindred
> types and willing management.
>
This sounds like the environment I went into at Nynex Science and 
Technology in White Plains, NY during the mid 90's. Labs all over the 
building, each one doing some groundbreaking (to me) research into cell 
phone coverage, voice recognition and synthesis, and a bunch of other 
things.

I did a short consulting stint there as IT support staff, probably not 
more than 6 months. I generally ruffled the feathers of the older 
support staff when it came to "fixing" things that were easy to fix. 
Like the bright (or not, to them) idea of moving everyone from disparate 
mail servers to one domain, and no longer needing to know which server a 
certain person's email account was on. {suna,sunb,sunc,etc}. I was 
getting tired of having to login to the boxes to see where a personal 
email account was. So I stayed late one night, made it so you could 
address anyone as "@*.domain" or just "@domain", and it would be routed 
accordingly, and wind up in the right place. They actually made me put 
it back the way it was the next day.

So, in terms of research, the place was awesome, I learned and was 
exposed to a lot of interesting topics. I could spend hours in a lab 
talking to the people there, brainstorming about all sorts of things.

But in terms of IT support, it was top-down committee-style system 
administration, and the older/more-senior IT people were not exactly the 
brightest bulbs. One of the IT managers there loved me, and would talk 
to me for hours about how to make things better. But his boss would tamp 
down any ideas of altering things even when the end-users wouldn't 
notice a difference except there was a newer easier way of doing the 
same thing.

Oh well, I never really played well with others anyway ;)

https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/20/business/business-technology-baby-bells-moving-into-the-lab.html

art k.


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