Not quite a dmr anecdote, but maybe this list can clear up a statement that dmr reputedly
made: “streams means something different when shouted”.
I think the claim goes back to around the turn of the millennium and as far as I know it
is not disputed that dmr either said this or could have said this.
Now, from reading this list over the years my understanding of the above statement is that
dmr designed streams as a mechanism to clean up the kernel handling of line disciplines in
a context of access via a terminal and/or modem, and that STREAMS developed this into a
way to integrate network stacks with the kernel — hence streams meant something different
when shouted.
The original dmr paper (1984) on streams (
http://cm.bell-labs.co/who/dmr/st.html) seemed
to support this understanding, focussing on terminal handling in its discussion. Also,
near the end it says: "Streams are linear connections; by themselves, they support no
notion of multiplexing, fan-in or fan-out. [...] It seems likely that a general
multiplexing mechanism could help in both cases, but again, I do not yet know how to
design it.” This seemed to exclude usage for networking, which is typically multiplexed.
However, now that the V8 sources are available it is clear that the streams mechanism was
used (by dmr?) to implement TCP/IP networking. He explains how that tallies with the above
quote on multiplexing in a 1985 usenet post:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topicsearchin/net.unix-wizards/subject$3A…
(if the post by dmr does not immediately appear, click on the 8-10-85 post by
'd...(a)dutoit.xn--uucp-y96a to make it fold out: this is the message I refer to).
The way I read this usenet post, dmr was actually reasonably content with implementing a
network stack on top of (lowercase) streams. This then implies that he was alluding to
something else when saying “streams means something different when shouted” (or maybe he
never said it).
Any opinions on what he might have meant?