After welcoming people to the 050th Reunion of the ‘Bunand other 1970’s computing at University of Waterloo in mid-August 2012, I’ve gathered together a photo album, the brief presentation from the Gala and the many comments received outside of the earlier blog post.
Before the Gala, almost 100 photos were gathered which have grown to almost 250 contributed by various attendees. Enjoy browsing the memories.
Dave conroy
Sytem controller
Card Reader
Line Printer
Removable Disc Driver
Randall Howard
Dave Buckingham
Charles Forsyth @ Math/Unix
Eric Manning
Dave Martindale
Robert Biddle
Mark Niemiec
Jim Gardner
Vic DiCiccio
Dave Martindale
Peter & Sylvia Raynham
Wendy Nabert Williams
Rohan Jayasekera
Hide Tokuda & San-Qui Li
Dave + Randall @ Mark Williams
Alex White
Randall @ MKS
The Hacks @ Randall&Judy Wedding
Math Building
Morven Gentleman
Morven Gentleman
Eric Manning
Eric Manning
Ciaran O’Donnell
Michael Dillon
Peter & Flaurie Stevens
Rick Beach
Rick Beach
Brad Templeton
Brad Templeton
Brad Templeton
Ian Chaprin
Ron & Amy Hansen
Jon Livesey
Johan George
Kelly Booth
Mike Malcolm
Ian! Allen
Linda Carson
Linda Carson
Dan Dodge
Dave Huron
R Anne Smith
Trevor J Tho,mpson
Math Building
I’ve also included the brief presentation from the Gala on Saturday 18 August, 2012 in case anyone wants to see that:
Finally, there was a lively discussion via email,Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter both from attendees and those who were unable to join us. The following is a summary of some of those reflections and comments:
Morven Gentleman
Randall,
The first story that comes to mind is how we got the Bun in the first place.
In 1971, Eric Manning and myself as young faculty members felt that it was embarrassing that a university which wanted to pride itself on Computer Science did not have any time-sharing capability, as all the major Computer Science schools did.
At the time, the Faculty of Mathematics was paying roughly $29,000/month to IBM for a IBM 360/50, which was hardly used at all – it apparently had originally been intended for process control, but that never happened. (Perhaps the 360/50 had been obtained at the same time as the 360/75 – I never knew.) So Eric and I approached the dean with a proposal to see if those funds could be diverted to be spent instead on obtaining time-sharing service. The dean approved us proceeding to investigate the options.
The popular time-sharing machine of the day in universities was the DEC PDP-10, so we wired a spec to get one, but issued the RFP to all vendors. In the end, we received bids from IBM, Control Data, Univac, DEC, and Honeywell. IBM bid a 360/67 running TSS 360 at more than twice what we were paying for the 360/50, and at the time only the University of Michigan’s MTS software actually worked at all on the machine: the bid was easily dismissed. Control Data bid a CDC 6400 at above our budget, but at the time didn’t have working time-sharing software: again easily dismissed. Univac bid an 1106, again above our budget, and although its OS, Exec 8, had some nice aspects as a batch system, we had no awareness of time-sharing on it: so we dismissed it too. DEC bid a KA 10 almost exactly at our budget: this was what we originally wanted, so it made the short list. Honeywell bid the 6050 for $24000/month, notable savings for the Faculty, and since I had used GCOS III at Bell Labs, I knew that even if not ideal, it would be acceptable: again on the short list.
Announcing the short list had a dramatic effect. DEC was so sure that they would win that they revealed that, as was their common practice in that day, they had low-balled the bid, and a viable system was actually going to cost $32,000/month.
Honeywell instead sweetened their bid – more for the same money, and the opportunity for direct involvement with Honeywell’s engineering group in Phoenix. Whereas with DEC we would be perhaps thousandth university in line, and unlikely to have any special relationship, Honeywell only had three other university customers: MIT, who were engrossed with Multics; Dartmouth, who had built their own DTSS system; and the University of Kansas, who had no aspirations in software development – we would be their GCOS partner.
The consequence was there was no contest. The Faculty cancelled the 360/50 contract and accepted Honeywell’s bid. I agreed to take on the additional responsibility for running the new time-sharing system. The machine had already been warehoused in Toronto, so it was installed as soon as the machine room on the third floor could be prepared.
Morven (aka wmgentleman)
Eric Manning
Hi Randall
Yes, all’s well here. I was mandatorily retired from UVic but continue to work on various projects for the Engineering Faculty, and a bit of consulting etc. Engineering has no end of interesting things to work on. I’m very sorry that I can’t attend your Unix/Bun/CCNG celebration; the mark we made certainly should be celebrated!
I’m distressed about the crash & burn of Nortel and now RIM, and I certainly wish you well in keeping the tech sector alive and well. Rocks, logs and banks alone do not a healthy economy make.
All the best
Eric
Gary Sager
Randall,
Unfortunately I have to be in Seattle at that time. It does sound like a good time will be had. I would especially like to go to the Heidelberg again (which I did have the occasion to do in 2001 [or so]).
After Waterloo, I did time at BTL (in Denver, working on real-time systems) then wound up at Sun in charge of the Operating Systems and Networking group — putting me in charge of what was arguably the best set of UNIX people ever assembled. Had a number of other adventures after Sun, and finally decided to retire when the people I was hiring were more interested in how much money they could make than in what they would be doing. Guess I was spoiled by the Sun people I managed.
I have a “blog” updated quarterly for friends and family: http://bclodge.com/index.htm
Do look us up if you are ever in this area (Bozeman, MT). Some memories:
One day some malicious (and uncreative) person copied down a script that was known to crash UNIX by making it essentially unusable. It went something like:
while true do mkdir crash cd crash done
Some subset of the hacks (I forget which) spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to undo the damage. The obvious things did not work. They finally decided to go to dinner and think about it. I stayed and thought of a way to fix the problem; I finished the fix just as they returned. They wanted to know how I did it. I never told them and am still holding the secret (it was a truly disgusting hack).
Anyhow, the hacks I most remember (other than yourself) were Ciaran O’Donnell (on LinkedIn), Dave Conroy, the underage Indian kid whose name escapes me at the moment, and one more Dave (Martindale?).
Some more stories:
Someone from Bell Labs came to give a talk about text to voice and gave a demo by logging in via phone modem to the Bell Labs computers. The hacks looked at the phone records and figured out how to log in to the BTL system. Suddenly our Math/UNIX system was getting all the latest new UNIX features before they were released (by means unbeknownst to me). The BTL people weren’t terribly happy when they found out, but they were happy to accept a guarantee it would stop.
We kept trying to use the IBM system to do printing with a connection to one of their channels (I think they were called). It would frequently stop working and someone would have to call the operator and say “restart channel 5” (or some other jargon). I had a meeting with the IBM staff to see if we could get the problem fixed. At that meeting I recall one of the staff was incredulous that our system did not reboot when they rebooted the IBM mainframe. Anyhow, they were reluctant to fix the problem so I told them I would fix it by buying a voice synthesizer (as demonstrated by BTL) and have our system call their operator to instruct them to “restart channel 5”. They fixed the problem.
The worst security problem I recall someone finding in the ‘Bun’ was to do an execute doubleword where the second word was another execute doubleword. Execute double word disabled interrupts — this was a way of
executing indivisible sequences of instructions. By chaining this way for exactly the right amount of time (1/60 second I think) and doing a system call as the last instruction, there would be a fault in the OS for disabling interrupts too long and the system would crash. I don’t know if anyone ever figured out a fix since this was essentially hardwired into the machine.
I assume there will be pictures, etc from the event….
Gary (aka grsager)
Richard Sexton
Richard Sexton: I still used the ‘bun for a few months when I moved to LA in 79 (x.25 ftw). I’d love to be there but can’t make it that day but I promise when there’s a similar event for math unix I will be there; that was the first (and I sometimes think only) decent computer I ever used.
When I worked with Dave Conroy summers at Teklogix, we worked for Ted Thorpe who was the Digital sales guy running around selling the same machine to six different universities just so they could sign for it at the shipping dock and get it on *this* years budget. Ted would then take the machine to the next school until Digital has actually made enough they could ship all the ones that had actually been ordered.
Stefan Vorkoetter: Wow! I remember using that machine in the 80s. It must have been kept alive for quite a while if it was installed 40 years ago.
Judy McMullan: It was decommissioned Apr 23, 1992 Brenda Parsons: The 6050 or the Level 66 or the DPS8 — wasn’t there a hardware change in there somewhere before ’92?
Jan Gray: Thanks for explaining the S.C. Johnson connection. I had no idea how the Unix culture came to Waterloo.
I was just a young twerp user, but I fondly remember the Telerays and particularly rmcrook/adv/hstar. As well as this dialog (approximate) :-
Sorry, colossal cave is closed now. > WIZARD Prove you’re a wizard? What’s the password? > XXXXX Foo, you are nothing but a charlatan.
c .r ..a …s ….h_
Ciaran O’Donnell
Random musings from the desk of Ciaran O’Donnell when he should be working
I would especially like to thank my dear friend Judy McMullan for organizing this wonderful reunion.
I am so glad to have gone to a University that was born the same year as me, that taught you Mathematics, that did not force you to program in Cobol or use an IBM-360, and that paid people like Reinaldo Braga to write a B compiler. It was nice to have L.J. Dickey teach you about APL in a world before Excel and to learn logic and geometry.
It was so nice to go to university, to not have to own a credit card or a car, to be able to wash floors at the co-op residence, and to pay tuition for the price of a 3-G iPad today. It was not so bad either not to get arrested for smoking pot or crashing the Honeywell main frame even though one was quite a nuisance, or to play politics on the Chevron.
It was so neat to be mentored by people like Ernie Chang and Jay Majithia. The University of Waterloo in the 1970s is an unsung place of great programming. I just have to look at what people like Ron Hansen accomplished designing a chess program or what David Conroy has become. As for myself, I have actually learned C++ and Java which proves that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
How things have changed. Back then, we kicked the Marxist-Leninists off the Chevron. Nowadays, communist officials from China can come to America and get a heroes welcome at a Los Angeles Lakers game. All I will say about my life since 1979 is that I have been in France is … “I KNOW NOTHING” like Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes.
I am especially grateful to Steven C Johnson for having inspired me to get into compilers and to Sunil Saxena for having encouraged me to come to California.
There are a lot of fun people down here from Waterloo including myself, Peter Stevens, Rick Beach, Sanjay Rhadia, David Cheriton, Dave Conroy, Kent Peacock, Sunil Saxena, John Williamson, and a whole bunch of others.
Ciaran (aka cgodonnell)
Dave Conroy
Sadly, I am not going to make it. It was touch and go right to the end, but I have to go to DC to be a witness in an ITC dispute.
Lynn and I will try and sync with the group online on Saturday.
Building larger technology companies is critical for our future economic well being, yet somehow we seem to pay more attention to the seed and startup phase. This post and a subsequent missive, Wisdom from Recent Waterloo Technology Acquisitions, aim to analyze some recipes for building technology businesses to scale first from the perspective of recent companies and then specifically through the lens of local acquisitions. This pair of posts will be based on extensive data, but the findings are intended to start discussion rather than be the last word.
The importance of building new, innovative, and large, companies can’t be underestimated regionally, provincially and nationally. Here in Waterloo, with perhaps 10 000 jobs at a single behemoth, Research in Motion, the notion of job creation is particularly topical simply to lessen our dependency on such a large company.
My sense is that, of late, most of the focus centres around making startups: small, energetic and entrepreneurial software, web and mobile companies, some simply building a mobile application. And, even with the current notion of Lean Startups or our Venture 2.0approach, there is no question that building such early stage companies is probably an order of magnitude cheaper than it was back in the 1990’s While undoubtedly a good thing for all concerned – founders, investors and consumers all have so much more choice – has this led to a corresponding increase in new major businesses in the technology sector?
I see this as more of a discussion than a simple answer, and thus to start, I include the following table of my sense of how the numbers have changed over time. The following table provides some idea of how company formation has trended over the last 25 years, through the lens of scale rather than acquisitions:
[table “” not found /]
NOTES ON DATA:
Sources: public records, internet, personal recollections and interviews with 20 key ecosystem participants.
The definition of “big” is purposely somewhat arbitrary (and perhaps vague). I am using a threshold of 50 employees or $10 million in revenues, which is probably more indicative of these startups becoming mid-sized businesses.
INITIAL INSIGHTS:
This data, while helpful, can never provide a complete answer. However, it can guide the conversation around what I see to be an important economic mission for our region and country – that is, building more significant technology businesses. I’m sure there are no easy answers, but in shaping policy, it is important to base decisions on informed debate and research.
To that end, I would offer the following thoughts:
The current plethora of “lean startups” does not (necessarily) represent a clear path to growing those startups into larger businesses.
I suspect that, in some ways, multiplying small startups can retard the growth of larger companies. That said, the data are insufficient to prove cause and effect.
At the ecosystem level, we need to focus resource allocation beyond simple startup creation to include building more long term, and larger, technology businesses. Instead of spreading talent and other resources thinly, key gaps in senior management talent (especially marketing) and access to capital (B rounds and beyond) need to be resolved.
Even in day to day discussion, the narrative must shift so that entrepreneurism isn’t just about startups, to make company building cool again.
Canada holds many smart, creative and hardworking entrepreneurs who will undoubtedly rise to the challenge of building our next generation economy. Meanwhile, I’d welcome comments, suggestions and feedback on how we can build dozens or more, instead of a handful, of larger technology companies in our region.
A marvellous exploration of a research and innovation powerhouse that, even viewed from this age of innovation, surprisingly anticipated many approaches we think of as modern breakthroughs. I’ve long admired Bell Labs and feel that many of its researchers and innovations interacted with an impacting my own career. While in University, the notion of working with or at Bell Labs was the highest aspiration for top thinkers in many fields. The Idea Factory is an engaging read and showed me how limited my understanding of that institution really was.
First of all, from the 1920s to the 1980s, it was way ahead of its time as an agent of innovation. The approaches were brilliant and could be applied today, including the notion of building architecture and organization structures to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration. Breaking down “knowledge silos” was definitely countercultural in a century known for specialization.
Secondly, the sheer number of transformational inventions, including the laser, transistor, fibre optics, satellite communications, the cellular mobile network, integrated circuits and the notion of information as digital that came from a single institution is both surprising and would be impossible in today’s world. Sadly, in the modern competitive marketplace, there is likely no room for a monolithic regulated monopoly, as was AT&T, to support such a single engine of innovation and basic research.
My primary connection with Bell Labs was through computer science with innovations such as UNIX and C Programming Language. The historical context this book outlines shows how surprising this is because AT&T was, by regulatory decree, precluded from entering the computer industry. That said, it is ironic that most of the inventions of Bell Labs, collectively contrived to make telecommunications as a separate industry obsolete. Instead, as predicted as early as 1948 by the remarkable information age seer, Claude Shannon, much of the modern economy has by transformed by our current digital age of networked and pervasive computing.
Lastly, Gertner explores the culture of those who drove innovation. Often eccentric, and to outsiders perhaps impossible or unemployable individuals, had the sheer force of will and brainpower to achieve breakthroughs that others either hadn’t even considered or thought impossible. Given my own small town origins, the deliberate strategy of finding these small town prodigies to populate the largest research-oriented brain trust in the world resonated.
All too often, societies believe that they are the first to master innovation. Sometimes we should stop and consider successful strategies from the past. Far from being solely a modern preoccupation, innovation has always been a hallmark of human advancement. Yet, with no clear place for a lucrative and regulated monopoly to fund pure research, where will the fundamental research of the future originate?
The book cites John Mayo, a former Bell Labs chief,
“Bell Labs substantial innovations, account for a large fraction of the jobs in this country and around the world”
In a world driven by global markets and the quarterly thinking of Wall Street, we really do need to consider how our next leap of fundamental research will be unleashed. John Pierce, another Bell Labs chief summarized the “Bell Labs formula” in four main points:
“A technically competent management all the way to the top. Researchers who didn’t have to raise funds. Research on a topic or system could be, and was, supported for years. Research could be terminated without damning the researcher.”
Beyond learning from the wisdom of the leading research institution, where will we find the vision and resources to enable innovation on such a transformational scale? Beyond the Venture Capital and now Angel funded technology startup ecosystem, perhaps exemplars like Mike Lazaridis‘s pioneering Perimeter Institute of Theoretical Physicswill chart a course for the 21st century.
17 Aug 2012
0 CommentsThe Bun Reunion “AfterMath”
After welcoming people to the 050th Reunion of the ‘Bun and other 1970’s computing at University of Waterloo in mid-August 2012, I’ve gathered together a photo album, the brief presentation from the Gala and the many comments received outside of the earlier blog post.
Before the Gala, almost 100 photos were gathered which have grown to almost 250 contributed by various attendees. Enjoy browsing the memories.
I’ve also included the brief presentation from the Gala on Saturday 18 August, 2012 in case anyone wants to see that:
Finally, there was a lively discussion via email, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn and Twitter both from attendees and those who were unable to join us. The following is a summary of some of those reflections and comments:
Randall,
The first story that comes to mind is how we got the Bun in the first place.
In 1971, Eric Manning and myself as young faculty members felt that it was embarrassing that a university which wanted to pride itself on Computer Science did not have any time-sharing capability, as all the major Computer Science schools did.
At the time, the Faculty of Mathematics was paying roughly $29,000/month to IBM for a IBM 360/50, which was hardly used at all – it apparently had originally been intended for process control, but that never happened. (Perhaps the 360/50 had been obtained at the same time as the 360/75 – I never knew.) So Eric and I approached the dean with a proposal to see if those funds could be diverted to be spent instead on obtaining time-sharing service. The dean approved us proceeding to investigate the options.
The popular time-sharing machine of the day in universities was the DEC PDP-10, so we wired a spec to get one, but issued the RFP to all vendors. In the end, we received bids from IBM, Control Data, Univac, DEC, and Honeywell. IBM bid a 360/67 running TSS 360 at more than twice what we were paying for the 360/50, and at the time only the University of Michigan’s MTS software actually worked at all on the machine: the bid was easily dismissed. Control Data bid a CDC 6400 at above our budget, but at the time didn’t have working time-sharing software: again easily dismissed. Univac bid an 1106, again above our budget, and although its OS, Exec 8, had some nice aspects as a batch system, we had no awareness of time-sharing on it: so we dismissed it too. DEC bid a KA 10 almost exactly at our budget: this was what we originally wanted, so it made the short list. Honeywell bid the 6050 for $24000/month, notable savings for the Faculty, and since I had used GCOS III at Bell Labs, I knew that even if not ideal, it would be acceptable: again on the short list.
Announcing the short list had a dramatic effect. DEC was so sure that they would win that they revealed that, as was their common practice in that day, they had low-balled the bid, and a viable system was actually going to cost $32,000/month.
Honeywell instead sweetened their bid – more for the same money, and the opportunity for direct involvement with Honeywell’s engineering group in Phoenix. Whereas with DEC we would be perhaps thousandth university in line, and unlikely to have any special relationship, Honeywell only had three other university customers: MIT, who were engrossed with Multics; Dartmouth, who had built their own DTSS system; and the University of Kansas, who had no aspirations in software development – we would be their GCOS partner.
The consequence was there was no contest. The Faculty cancelled the 360/50 contract and accepted Honeywell’s bid. I agreed to take on the additional responsibility for running the new time-sharing system. The machine had already been warehoused in Toronto, so it was installed as soon as the machine room on the third floor could be prepared.
Morven (aka wmgentleman)
Hi Randall
Yes, all’s well here. I was mandatorily retired from UVic but continue to work on various projects for the Engineering Faculty, and a bit of consulting etc. Engineering has no end of interesting things to work on.
I’m very sorry that I can’t attend your Unix/Bun/CCNG celebration; the mark we made certainly should be celebrated!
I’m distressed about the crash & burn of Nortel and now RIM, and I certainly wish you well in keeping the tech sector alive and well.
Rocks, logs and banks alone do not a healthy economy make.
All the best
Eric
Randall,
Unfortunately I have to be in Seattle at that time. It does sound like a good time will be had. I would especially like to go to the Heidelberg again (which I did have the occasion to do in 2001 [or so]).
After Waterloo, I did time at BTL (in Denver, working on real-time systems) then wound up at Sun in charge of the Operating Systems and Networking group — putting me in charge of what was arguably the best set of UNIX people ever assembled. Had a number of other adventures after Sun, and finally decided to retire when the people I was hiring were more interested in how much money they could make than in what they would be doing. Guess I was spoiled by the Sun people I managed.
I have a “blog” updated quarterly for friends and family: http://bclodge.com/index.htm
Do look us up if you are ever in this area (Bozeman, MT). Some memories:
One day some malicious (and uncreative) person copied down a script that was known to crash UNIX by making it essentially unusable. It went something like:
Some subset of the hacks (I forget which) spent a great deal of time trying to figure out how to undo the damage. The obvious things did not work. They finally decided to go to dinner and think about it. I stayed and thought of a way to fix the problem; I finished the fix just as they returned. They wanted to know how I did it. I never told them and am still holding the secret (it was a truly disgusting hack).
Anyhow, the hacks I most remember (other than yourself) were Ciaran O’Donnell (on LinkedIn), Dave Conroy, the underage Indian kid whose name escapes me at the moment, and one more Dave (Martindale?).
Some more stories:
Someone from Bell Labs came to give a talk about text to voice and gave a demo by logging in via phone modem to the Bell Labs computers. The hacks looked at the phone records and figured out how to log in to the BTL system. Suddenly our Math/UNIX system was getting all the latest new UNIX features before they were released (by means unbeknownst to me). The BTL people weren’t terribly happy when they found out, but they were happy to accept a guarantee it would stop.
We kept trying to use the IBM system to do printing with a connection to one of their channels (I think they were called). It would frequently stop working and someone would have to call the operator and say “restart channel 5” (or some other jargon). I had a meeting with the IBM staff to see if we could get the problem fixed. At that meeting I recall one of the staff was incredulous that our system did not reboot when they rebooted the IBM mainframe. Anyhow, they were reluctant to fix the problem so I told them I would fix it by buying a voice synthesizer (as demonstrated by BTL) and have our system call their operator to instruct them to “restart channel 5”. They fixed the problem.
The worst security problem I recall someone finding in the ‘Bun’ was to do an execute doubleword where the second word was another execute doubleword. Execute double word disabled interrupts — this was a way of
executing indivisible sequences of instructions. By chaining this way for exactly the right amount of time (1/60 second I think) and doing a system call as the last instruction, there would be a fault in the OS for disabling interrupts too long and the system would crash. I don’t know if anyone ever figured out a fix since this was essentially hardwired into the machine.
I assume there will be pictures, etc from the event….
Gary (aka grsager)
Richard Sexton: I still used the ‘bun for a few months when I moved to LA in 79 (x.25 ftw). I’d love to be there but can’t make it that day but I promise when there’s a similar event for math unix I will be there; that was the first (and I sometimes think only) decent computer I ever used.
When I worked with Dave Conroy summers at Teklogix, we worked for Ted Thorpe who was the Digital sales guy running around selling the same machine to six different universities just so they could sign for it at the shipping dock and get it on *this* years budget. Ted would then take the machine to the next school until Digital has actually made enough they could ship all the ones that had actually been ordered.
Check out Thinkage‘s GCOS expl catalog for real down-memory-lane fun: http://www.thinkage.ca/english/gcos/expl/masterindex.html
I was just a young twerp user, but I fondly remember the Telerays and particularly rmcrook/adv/hstar. As well as this dialog (approximate) :-
Random musings from the desk of Ciaran O’Donnell when he should be working
I would especially like to thank my dear friend Judy McMullan for organizing this wonderful reunion.
I am so glad to have gone to a University that was born the same year as me, that taught you Mathematics, that did not force you to program in Cobol or use an IBM-360, and that paid people like Reinaldo Braga to write a B compiler. It was nice to have L.J. Dickey teach you about APL in a world before Excel and to learn logic and geometry.
It was so nice to go to university, to not have to own a credit card or a car, to be able to wash floors at the co-op residence, and to pay tuition for the price of a 3-G iPad today. It was not so bad either not to get arrested for smoking pot or crashing the Honeywell main frame even though one was quite a nuisance, or to play politics on the Chevron.
It was so neat to be mentored by people like Ernie Chang and Jay Majithia. The University of Waterloo in the 1970s is an unsung place of great programming. I just have to look at what people like Ron Hansen accomplished designing a chess program or what David Conroy has become. As for myself, I have actually learned C++ and Java which proves that you can teach an old dog new tricks.
How things have changed. Back then, we kicked the Marxist-Leninists off the Chevron. Nowadays, communist officials from China can come to America and get a heroes welcome at a Los Angeles Lakers game. All I will say about my life since 1979 is that I have been in France is … “I KNOW NOTHING” like Sgt. Schultz from Hogan’s Heroes.
I am especially grateful to Steven C Johnson for having inspired me to get into compilers and to Sunil Saxena for having encouraged me to come to California.
There are a lot of fun people down here from Waterloo including myself, Peter Stevens, Rick Beach, Sanjay Rhadia, David Cheriton, Dave Conroy, Kent Peacock, Sunil Saxena, John Williamson, and a whole bunch of others.
Ciaran (aka cgodonnell)
Sadly, I am not going to make it. It was touch and go right to the end, but I have to go to DC to be a witness in an ITC dispute.
Lynn and I will try and sync with the group online on Saturday.
dgc