[TUHS] Charles Forsyth on putting Unix on a diet.

[usotsuki@buric.co (Steve Nickolas)]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2017, George Michaelson wrote:

> I worked with Charles in the University of York. he's the guy who said
> to me "how can it be simple, if the printout is half an inch thick"
> about SMTP.
>
> Charles also enjoyed himself: fancy dress, he had a full on Sun-King
> court suit made, to go with his huge head of hair. This, in york, a
> city of red-brick terraced houses, back-to-backs, and beer. Louis XIV
> walking down t' road for a pint...

This is that guy who did the clone of the v7 Bourne shell that used to be 
used in Minix and PicoBSD and was the basis of pdksh?

(There was, actually, a Korn shell clone for MS-DOS and OS/2 based on it.)

> I think when he implemented streams in one or two pages of text from
> the BLTJ article, and then sighed at the size of STREAMS when it came
> to life.. says it all.  he was very very strong on a reductionist
> 'size matters' world view. His editor of choice in 1984 was ed, with a
> command macro to repaint -22 + 22 about the . line.

I personally believe a lot of code in modern operating systems is larger 
than the task requires.

-uso.