15 Mar
2024
15 Mar
'24
7:43 p.m.
On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 9:03 AM Dan Cross <crossd(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 3:00 AM Rob Pike <robpike(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Sorry, just to clarify: I meant I had no idea Dennis's posting about
the event happened so late; by 1998 USENET was basically overrun by
spam. Obviously, the inspection trip had happened much earlier.
- Dan C.
Another detail. There was lawyerly concern about
the code being stolen, and we (127) were asked to find ways to test, absent their source,
whether they had just stolen our source and built the binaries. It was soon concluded that
there were enough details different to definitively say that at least most of the work was
done in a clean room, as advertised, but the piece I liked best is that their PPT(1)
program (ASCII art showing a paper tape rendering the argument text) did not include the
original, and just discovered, bug that mispunched, if I remember right, the letter
'R'.
Along those lines, Dennis Ritchie wrote up a summary of the event on
USENET; apparently in 1998 (I had no idea it was this late):
https://groups.google.com/g/alt.folklore.computers/c/_ZaYeY46eb4/m/5B41Uym6…