vic was my department head upon my arrival at
bell labs (june 1966). i went to my assigned office
and found vic, in combat boots, in a lotus position
on top of my filing cabinet. it is a vision that i will
never forget. he had just come to introduce himself.


On Sat, Apr 9, 2022 at 4:48 AM Douglas McIlroy <
douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:

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 due to his colleagues Bob Prim and Joe Kruskal, again unpublished.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