[TUHS] Re: Weinberger stencil? (was: rtm)

[TUHS] Re: Weinberger stencil? (was: rtm)

[Dennis Ritchie]

Lehey wondered:

>  ....  can
> you shed any light on the "Peter Weinberger stencil" incident?  ...

> Somebody came across the idea of
> making a large stencil of his face in death-star like technology,
>  and used it to paint an image of him on a nearby water tower.
>  Allegedly the costs were charged to Peter's department.

>  Some years later, this stencil arrived in Greg Rose's office in
>  Australia from an anonymous sender.  Greg has a suspicion who the
>  sender was, but no proof, so he doesn't want to comment.  He gave it
>  to our own Warren Toomey, who still has it in his garage.

>  At some point, Peter Salus suggested that the image was of Rob Pike...

I could recover some of the dates, but
not accurately from memory.  Weinberger was promoted,
first to department head, then to being director of a
newly-created but next-door center, then to our own
executive director.  This would have been mid-late 80s,
early 90s.  He was being groomed, it appears.
Shortly before trivestiture, 1994ish, he went to
the business part of AT&T, possibly in preparation
for coming back to a higher management position
at the Labs.  When the Lucent/AT&T split occurred
he was somewhat caught on the AT&T side.
He ended up leaving AT&T and going to a financial
quant company.

His image was particularly striking, and was used
to kid him in various ways, e,g, as a default image
in mail icons.  The image rendering his
face with the Deathstar styling was done by
Tom Duff, and it appeared, for example, on
T-shirts worn publically at venues like Usenix
and elsewhere.  Other versions of it
appear inscribed in concrete now buried
beneath floors at the Labs.  There is a
bitmap version (rendered in 1cm magnets) of the
full image, not death-starred, high on
a steel wall above a landing on a nearby
stairwell.

The large stencilled image of the Deathstar/PJW
rendition did indeed appear suddenly one day on
a water tower; it must have been about 10 feet
tall.  Kernighan had  a photo of it, and Gerard
Holzmann just scanned it:

    http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/who/dmr/pix/watertower.jpg

It was painted over quite rapidly,
a couple of days at most.  (The tower itself
is now gone, though not because of this.)
The image was certainly not of Rob Pike.

After this happened, a voucher was pinned up
on a communal corkboard, claiming expenses
for several cans of blue spray paint.  The voucher
was signed by one G. R. Emlin, a fictitious personage
with his (later her) own history.  Attached to
it was a handwritten note from our then Executive
Director (Vic Vyssotsky) saying approximately
as follows:

	Unfortunately, this voucher cannot be
	approved by me; I am not empowered
	to approve Real Estate improvements.

	If Mr. Emlin would like to arrange a transfer
	to the Building and Grounds department,
	I would be happy to assist.

So: who did it?  If Greg Rose suspects certain
aviation-inclined buddies, I in turn think his
suspicions are likely to be well-founded.

I managed to retrieve the image used to create the stencil;
it's now linked-to near the bottom of

 http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/10thEdMan/v2pix.html

	Dennis

[TUHS] Re: Weinberger stencil? (was: rtm)

[Norman Wilson]

This is certainly non-technical UNIX history, which is not to
say it isn't interesting.

I can sharpen up a few details of Dennis's account.  Peter was
already a department head when I first visited the Labs in early
1984.  I believe his face was already a favourite test image for
various graphics experts, but the cult of the face didn't really
get started until the following year.

In particular I think it was in the summer of 1985 that Tom Duff
thought of the deathstar transform (turning a picture into variable-
width horizontal stripes, as the AT&T logo to a highlighted sphere).
Certainly it was later that year that the much-bigger-than-life
image appeared on the water tower: my calendar file still says

	sep 16	btl water tower 1985

Peter was still a department head at that time; he didn't climb
further into management until about 1990.

As I recall, the water tower remained painted for a couple of days.
A two-man team from the Physical Plant department finally covered it
over: one man in overalls wielding paint, another in suit and tie
watching to be sure no trace remained.

Lest people get the wrong idea, Peter took no offense at the
overuse of his face.  In fact a few years later he agreed to
have a plaster cast made.  Someone (Duff?) then made a latex
positive from the plaster negative, intending to digitize it
somehow into a three-dimensional model.  I don't know if that
ever happened, but I did borrow the latex one day, used it to
generate another negative in ice, and cast a large chocolate
truffle which I then set out in the UNIX Room (as the group's
common terminal room was called) for all to enjoy.

That may have been the only really interesting use of the 3d
face.  In any case the plaster cast was presented to me when
I left the Labs in 1990, and I still have it, though I haven't
done anything with it since.

There were also some smaller stencils made of the same deathstar-
Peter face.  (In fact I have it on good authority that the big
one was made by projecting one of the smaller ones on a wall.)
When Bell Labs bought a Cray X-MP in 1986 or 1987 (my records aren't
that complete), one of our group made several visits to Cray to
get a head start on a special network interface we would need.
He took along one of the small stencils and put a few Peter faces
on panels that were normally covered up when the machine was running.
(The Cray was to be shared by Research and the Comp Center, and the
Comp Center were a bit stuffier.)  To everyone's surprise, when the
machine arrived it bore no extra decorations.  Presumably Cray shipped
the painted system to another customer; we never found out who.

The Computing Science Research Center was a fun place to work.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON