2 Aug
2020
2 Aug
'20
9:12 p.m.
I was one of those high school employees, but worked year-round on weekends and full time
in the summers into college. I came from the Explorer’s Club (scouts). Walter L. Brown of
the Radiation Physics deptartment hired me mainly as a sysadmin on his lab’s PDP 11/45. (I
still have all the manuals!). I also did some coding for him - one project I remember was
doing some sort of processing of raw data from a magnetometer on the Voyager-1 spacecraft.
I also worked for Steve Bourne re-writing some FORTRAN code into C.
I would use the terminals in the Unix room typing my school papers using troff, printing
them out on the phototypesetter, and presenting them in a Bell Labs white cover. I got to
chat with Brian and Dennis and Doug (hi Doug!) and others often.
I remember having lunch downstairs in the cafeteria and learning to play GO and having
conversations with random employees that blew the mind of this teenager. I remember Steve
Marcus showing me his speech synthesizer and speech recognition system, playing with a
Unix system running in a box the size of a toaster oven, going to talks that mostly went
over my head but still learning a huge amount, wandering those long hallways and peeking
into people’s labs, ogling at the Cray in the computer center, etc.
Those years created a future for me: I worked at AT&T (Long Lines and International)
and Sun Microsystems, and still use Unix every day at Two Sigma (a quantitive hedge fund
with a huge Unix infrastructure).
Not sure I made any lasting contributions, but it left a lasting impression on me.
Rob
On Aug 2, 2020, at 9:42 AM, Doug McIlroy
<doug(a)cs.dartmouth.edu> wrote:
My unscientific survey of summer students was that they either came
from scouts, or were people working on advanced degrees in college.
Not all high-school summer employees were scouts (or scout equivalents -
kids who had logins on BTL Unix machines). I think in particular of Steve
Johnson and Stu Feldman, who eventually became valued permanent employees.
The labs also hired undergrad summer employees. I was one.
Even high-school employees could make lasting contributions. I am
indebted to Steve for a technique he conceived during his first summer
assignment: using macro definitions as if they were units of associative
memory. This view of macros stimulated previously undreamed-of uses.
Doug