The Unix Heritage Society mailing list
 help / color / mirror / Atom feed
From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
To: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] {TUHS] Interesting Commentary on Unix from Multicians
Date: Sat, 9 Apr 2022 07:45:10 -0400	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAKH6PiWSOKFRe0oi92iygvTF1guH=vm5UQ-2OHm5t4HAcJPsNg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

> 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due to his colleagues Bob Prim and Joe Kruskal, again unpublished.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

             reply	other threads:[~2022-04-09 11:47 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 12+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2022-04-09 11:45 Douglas McIlroy [this message]
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

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

  Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style

* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
  switches of git-send-email(1):

  git send-email \
    --in-reply-to='CAKH6PiWSOKFRe0oi92iygvTF1guH=vm5UQ-2OHm5t4HAcJPsNg@mail.gmail.com' \
    --to=douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu \
    --cc=tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org \
    /path/to/YOUR_REPLY

  https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html

* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
  via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line before the message body.
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).