‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Wednesday, August 4th, 2021 at 6:12 PM, Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: This looks great, thank you! john

The 'Pi that is running Plan9 or some Unix, not a separate one! -- Bakul

john, don't forget to mention the beer can On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 9:29 AM John Floren <john(a)jfloren.net> wrote:

The story of the mice, one of which I gave to John: I ran a program called FAST-OS for LANL/Sandia for 6 years starting 2005. Think of it as "Plan 9 on petaflop supercomputers" -- it may seem strange now, but in that era when some top end systems ran custom kernels, there was a strong case to be made that plan 9 was a good choice. By 2011, of course, the Linux tsunami had swept all before it, which is why you no longer hear about custom HPC kernels so much -- though in some places they still reign. In any event, this program gave me 6 years to work with "the Unix room", or what was left of it. I had been in the Unix Room in 1978, and even met Dennis, so this prospect was quite a treat. We funded Charles Forsyth to write the amd64 compilers for Plan 9, which if you used early Go you ran into (6c 6a 6l); we also funded the amd64 port of Plan 9 (a.k.a. k10) as well as the port to Blue Gene. That amd64 port is still out and about. You can find the Blue Gene kernel on github. I had lots of fun spending time in the Unix room while working with the late Jim McKie, and others. I saw the tail end of the traditions. They had cookie day once a week, if memory serves, on Thursday at 3. I got to see the backwards-running clock, Ken's chess trophies, his pilot's license, pictures of Peter everywhere, a "Reagan's view of the world" map, the American Legion award for Telstar (which was rescued from a dumpster!), and so on. The "Unix room" was more than one room, all built on a raised floor, as I assume it was former old school machine room space. If memory serves, it filled the entire width of the end of the top floor of the building it was in (4th floor?) -- maybe 50 ft x 50 ft -- maybe a bit more. There was a room with desks, and a similar-sized room with servers, and a smaller room containing a lab-style sink, a very professional cappucinno machine, decades of old proceedings, and a sofa. I fixed the heavy-duty coffee grinder one year; for some reason the Italian company that produced it had seen fit to switch BOTH hot and neutral, and the fix was to only switch hot, as the neutral switch had failed; I guess in the EU, with 220v, things are done differently. It was fun being there. A few years later the whole room, and all its history, was trashed, and replaced with what Jim called a "middle management wxx dream" (Jim was never at a loss for words); Jim found some yellow Police crime scene tape and placed it in front of the doors to the new space. It was redubbed "the innovation space" or some such, and looked kind of like an ikea showroom. Much was lost. I tried to find a way to save the contents of the room; I had this dream of recreating it at Google, much as John Wanamaker's office was preserved in Philadelphia for so many decades, but I was too late. I have no idea where the contents are now. Maybe next to the Ark. One day in 2008 or so jmk took me for a tour of the buildings, and we at one point ended up high in the top floor of what I think was Building One (since torn down?), in what used to be Lab Supply. Nobody was there, and not much supply was there either. Finally somebody wandered in, and Jim asked where everyone was. "Oh, they closed lab supply, maybe 4 years ago?" Bell Labs had seen hard times since the Lucent split, and it was clear it had not quite recovered, and Lab Supply was just one sign of it. I think the saddest thing was seeing the visitor center, which I first saw in 1976. In 1976, it was the seat of the Bell System Empire, and it was huge. There was a map of the US with a light lit for every switching office in the Bell Labs system. There was all kinds of Bell Labs history in the visitor center museum. The museum had shrunk to a much smaller area, and felt like a closet. The original transistor was still there in 2010, but little else.The library was, similarly, changed: it was dark and empty, I was told. Money was saved. At that time, Bell Labs felt large, strangely quiet, and emptied of people. It made me think of post-sack Rome, ca. 600, when its population was estimated to be 500. I have not been back since 2011 so maybe things are very different. It would be nice if so. As part of this tour, Jim gave me 3 depraz mice. I took one, gutted it, (sorry!), and filled its guts with a USB mouse innards, and gave it back to Jim. He then had a Depraz USB mouse. jmk's mouse did not have any lead in it, as John's did, however. The second I gave to someone at Google who had worked at the labs back in the day. The third mouse I gave to John, and he made it live again, which is cool. In spite of their reputation, I found Depraz mice hard to use. I have gone through all kinds of mice, and am on an evoluent, and as far as Depraz go, I guess "you had to be there". I don't recall if jmk used his "usb depraz" or it ended up on a shelf. Sadly, I can no longer ask him. I'll be interested to see what John thinks of the Depraz. ron On Fri, Aug 6, 2021 at 9:52 AM John Floren <john(a)jfloren.net> wrote:

+1. I think there is a market for custom-fitted mice carved out of fancy wood or various metals. The basic shape should follow the Depraz mouse. Maybe a good idea for Etsy. ches