John was certainly...different.

Here is a file I found in his home directory after
he was no longer with us:

        A Short History
              of
          John Mackin
              or
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and
        Love the Machine

I was born in the dawn of computing, three
days after the first FORTRAN compiler became
operational. My first words were "BALR R4".

My introduction to modern computing was on
a DECsystem-10 (which shall remain nameless).
Continuing down the track with Digital
hardware, I found out about PDP-11s and acquired
a reputation as the Man who could Answer Hard
Questions. I became completely nocturnal in
order to get better system response and avoid
landlords. I ate lots of pizzas, and knew the
octal encoding for any -10 or -11 instruction.

But there was something missing.

In 1977 I saw Level 6 UNIX (a trademark, of
course, of AT&T Bell Laboratories). It was
queer, and it was very buggy, and it was
running on a very unstable 11/40. But it
had that ``je ne sais quoi''. From that
time on, it's been a never-ending progression:
through V7, system III, PWB, AUSAM and Berkeley
to System V, and now Release 2.0. Sometimes
advocating and sometimes resisting creeping
featurism, I can still Answer Hard Questions
(and amazingly trivial ones too). The secret
is to read the manuals -- but I long ago despaired
of getting others to do that.

My interests, apart from UNIX (you mean there IS
something apart from UNIX?), are -- well -- I'm
sure I USED to have some ... ...

On Thu, Apr 6, 2017 at 8:52 AM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org> wrote:

On Wed, 5 Apr 2017, Peter Jeremy wrote:

> >And I still bear the scars from the aus.bizarre war... And I'll bet
> >that not many people remember that little episode :-)
>
> Who is going to take the roll of "Iron Bar"?

Oh gawd... It was a sad day when we lost him; I really missed him.

--
Dave Horsfall DTM (VK2KFU) "Those who don't understand security will suffer."