7 Jan
2025
7 Jan
'25
2:42 p.m.
Was the landscape of signal processing solutions just
so
particular that trying to create a centralized interface didn't make
sense at
the time? Or was it a simple matter of priorities,
with things like
language
development and system design taking center stage,
leaving a dearth of
resources
to direct towards these sorts of matters? Was there
ever a chance of
seeing,
say, the 5ESS handling of PCM, extended out to
non-switching
applications,
In the early days of Unix there were intimate ties between CS Research and
Visual and Acoustic Research. V&A were Bell Labs' pioneer minicomputer
users because they needed interactive access to graphics and audio, which
would have been prohibitively expensive on the Labs' pre-timesharing
mainframes. Also they generally had EE backgrounds, so were comfortable
working hands-on with hardware, whereas CS had been largely spun off from
the math department.
Ed David, who led Bell Labs into Multics, without which Unix might not have
happened, had transferred from V&A to CS. So had Vic Vyssotsky and Elliot
Pinson (Dennis's department head and coauthor with me of the introduction
to the 1978 BSTJ Unix issue). John Kelly, a brilliant transferee who died
all too young pre-Unix, had collaborated with Vic on BLODI, the first
dataflow language, which took digital signal processing off breadboards and
into computers. One central member of the Unix lab, Lee McMahon, never left
V&A.
The PDP-7 of Unix v0 was a hand-me-down from Pinson's time in V&A. And the
PDP-11 of v1 was supported by a year-end fund surplus from there.
People came from V&A to CS because their interests had drifted from signal
processing to computing per se. With hindsight, one can see that CS
recruiting--even when it drew on engineering or physics
talent--concentrated on similarly motivated people. There was dabbling in
acoustics, such as my "speak" text-to-speech program. And there were
workers dedicated to a few specialties, such as Henry Baird in optical
character recognition. But unlike text processing, say, these fields never
reached a critical mass of support that might have stimulated a wider array
of I/O drivers or full toolkits to use them.
Meanwhile, in V&A Research linguists adopted Unix, but most others
continued to roll their own one-off platforms. It's interesting to
speculate whether the lack of audio interfaces in Unix was a cause or a
result of this do-it-yourself impulse.
Doug