* [TUHS] Death of dmr @ 2011-10-13 2:00 Greg 'groggy' Lehey 2011-10-13 4:33 ` Randy Belk 2011-10-13 5:12 ` Larry McVoy 0 siblings, 2 replies; 3+ messages in thread From: Greg 'groggy' Lehey @ 2011-10-13 2:00 UTC (permalink / raw) For those of you who haven't heard yet, dmr died on Sunday. Rob Pike announced it at https://plus.google.com/101960720994009339267/posts/ENuEDDYfvKP I don't know what to say. A *real* giant is dead. And almost the saddest thing is that nobody has paid any attention. Greg -- Sent from my desktop computer Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. See complete headers for address and phone numbers. This message is digitally signed. If your Microsoft MUA reports problems, please read http://tinyurl.com/broken-mua -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 196 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20111013/0a7c8d95/attachment.sig> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Death of dmr 2011-10-13 2:00 [TUHS] Death of dmr Greg 'groggy' Lehey @ 2011-10-13 4:33 ` Randy Belk 2011-10-13 5:12 ` Larry McVoy 1 sibling, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread From: Randy Belk @ 2011-10-13 4:33 UTC (permalink / raw) I just post my response I put on Rob Pike's Google+ Page. I meet Dennis once, maybe talked to him 5 minutes. But he left a lasting impression on me about his love for simplicity and UNIX. Another one of my hero's is dead. My deepest condolences go out to his family and to the UNIX community. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20111012/82bae088/attachment.html> ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
* [TUHS] Death of dmr 2011-10-13 2:00 [TUHS] Death of dmr Greg 'groggy' Lehey 2011-10-13 4:33 ` Randy Belk @ 2011-10-13 5:12 ` Larry McVoy 1 sibling, 0 replies; 3+ messages in thread From: Larry McVoy @ 2011-10-13 5:12 UTC (permalink / raw) Another hero gone. Dennis and I spoke a few times, did a lot more in email, and none of that was because he knew me or who I was (I wasn't anyone except someone who liked Unix). Rather go on and on about what little interaction I had with Dennis, I'll give you my Unix "aha" moment. You'll probably think it is stupid but it was an epiphany for me. A long time ago, I was ...!uwvax!lm and the University of Wisconsin had a VAX 11/750 called slovax. slovax had the 4.x BSD source code on it and somehow I wangled an account there. I spent a _lot_ of hours reading the source. One day I was reading libc source and got to popen(). Holy shit, popen() forks a sub process! What a cool way to do it (not that I had in mind any other way to do it, it just never occurred to me that you'd create a new process in a library routine). I was expecting some magic that I just wouldn't understand (having spent a bunch of time looking at context switch assembly, I was just prepared for something like that). The simplicity of popen() was an aha moment for me, there have been a bunch of others, that was the first. Thank you Dennis and Brian and Ken and Joe and Doug and all the others who not only built this stuff but also took the time to document it so well. And thanks for the smallness: work:/home/unix/v7 find . -name '*.[chly]' | xargs cat | wc -l 168881 168K lines of code for a kernel, a compiler, assembler, debugger, profiler, awk, make, cron, roff (I love roff), diff, grep, ed, f77, lex, lint, yacc, m4, tar, even uucp. Are you kidding me? All that in 168K lines? We make a source management system, a good one, but it's bigger than that. The Unix guys kick our butts. RIP, Dennis, a very nice man as well as gifted. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com ^ permalink raw reply [flat|nested] 3+ messages in thread
end of thread, other threads:[~2011-10-13 5:12 UTC | newest] Thread overview: 3+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed) -- links below jump to the message on this page -- 2011-10-13 2:00 [TUHS] Death of dmr Greg 'groggy' Lehey 2011-10-13 4:33 ` Randy Belk 2011-10-13 5:12 ` Larry McVoy
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox; as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).