8 Mar
2021
8 Mar
'21
8:37 a.m.
I became troff buddies with him. I love troff and all the other tools,
pic especially because you can read pic code and see the picture in your
head. Richard and I shared that love for pic. He and I talked quite a
bit about how to do stuff in troff. Troff buddies is the best way to
describe what we had, we bonded over that but I wasn't close to him
otherwise. Still miss him and our troff exchanges, he was a great
guy, those books were the best in their day.
He was a lot like Dennis, willing to talk to you and educate you if you
had a clue.
On Sun, Mar 07, 2021 at 07:23:55PM -0700, Adam Thornton wrote:
The Richard Stevens books were huge here. I did not
know him well but
emailed with him a few times in the year before he died. I never met him
in person but he was very kind to a much younger and more ignorant me.
On Sun, Mar 7, 2021 at 7:21 PM wojciech(a)koszek.com <wojciech(a)koszek.com>
wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> I'm Wojciech Adam Koszek and I'm a new member here. After a short stint
> with Red Hat 6.0 and Slackware Linux around 2000-2001 (I think it was
> Slackware 7.0 or 7.1) my journey with UNIX started with FreeBSD 4.5. I fell
> in love with BSD and through Warner Losh, Robert Watson, and folks from a
> Polish UNIX scene, I became hooked. I ended up working with FreeBSD for the
> following 15 years or so.
>
> Anyway: the volume of the UNIX literature back then in Poland was scarce,
> yet through a small bookstore and a friendly salesman I got myself a "UNIX
> Network Programming Volume 1" at a huge discount, and read it back-to-back.
>
> Looking back, his books had a huge impact on my life (I had all his books,
> and read everything line by line, with a slight exception of TCP/IP
> illustrated vol 2, which I used as a reference), and while Stevens's
> website sheds some light on what he did, I often wonder what is the story
> behind how his books came to be. It doesn't help he appeared a very private
> person--never have I seen a photo of him anywhere.
>
> What was the reception of his books in the US?
>
> Did you know him? Do you know any more details about what he did after
> 1990?
>
> Thanks and take care,
>
> Wojciech Adam Koszek
--
---
Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm