socp
Tom Lyon ✅New, long, oral history of Ken Thompson, my and everyone's hero.
From the Computer History Museum: https://computerhistory.org/blog/a-computing-legend-speaks/
Click thru a while to get a text transcript.
Darryl RammFantastic stuff.
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I like that Ken got a friend in Australia interested in making LP gas potato guns. Long PVC pipe, LP gas, igniter, potatoes. What could go wrong... (... given Australian police have no sense of humor).
Karl Auerbach@aka_pugs I've met Ken Thompson a couple of times.
First time was at what I think was the first Unix users meeting in Champaign Urbana where there was a party (I think at Greg Chesson's place?) where Ken T. was chatting about his idea to build a chess playing computer.
Another time he introduced himself as a person "who missed fame and fortune by one letter" (he invented the language B.)
But one must read his "Reflections on Trusting Trust"
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf
ednl 🇪🇺@aka_pugs What do you make of this story where they had to cut to black; who was "some major US manufacturing company [who] has paid every one of these people to make this lawsuit, and it brought the whole thing down"? Apple perhaps, or Microsoft. I think the latter more likely because they have a search engine, but "manufacturing co." seems less apt.
@ednl I've heard before that it was Microsoft.
@aka_pugs I guess his phrasing could be a tiny bit of deliberate obfuscation. Probably my ESL understanding of "manufacturing" is slightly different, or maybe he equates hardware and software more than how I now think of them. He does also say on page 14: "mentally, there's no difference between a hardware patent and a software patent, basically you could build hardware to do this."
john spurling