Computer scientist Per Brinch Hansen was born on this day in 1938; he was
known for his work on "monitors" (now known as operating systems),
concurrent programming, parallel processing, etc.
-- Dave
Donald Michie, a computer scientist, was born in 1923; he was famous for
his work in AI, and also worked at Bletchley Park on the "Tunny" cipher.
And Robert Fano, Computer scientist and Professor of Electrical
Engineering at MIT, was born on this day in 1917. He worked with Claude
Shannon on Information Theory, was involved in the development of
time-sharing computers, and was Founding Director of Project Mac, which
became MIT's AI Lab.
-- Dave
We lost computer architect Gene Amdahl on this day in 2015; responsible
for "Amdahl's Law" (referring to parallel computing), he had a hand in the
IBM-704, the System/360, and founded Amdahl Corporation (a clone of the
360/370 series).
-- Dave
PUP sent out an announcement of BWK's latest tome
(https://press.princeton.edu/titles/14171.html). I am bemused that
his accolades do not mention UNIX (and yes, target audience and all
that).
N.
The infamous Morris Worm was released in 1988; making use of known
vulnerabilities in Sendmail/finger/RSH (and weak passwords), it took out a
metric shitload of SUN-3s and 4BSD Vaxen (the author claimed that it was
accidental, but the idiot hadn't tested it on an isolated network first). A
temporary "condom" was discovered by Rich Kulawiec with "mkdir /tmp/sh".
Another fix was to move the C compiler elsewhere.
-- Dave
