18 Apr
2019
18 Apr
'19
6:09 p.m.
What is Dennis's character? Is he very humorous? Thank you.
He was more humorous when he was still alive, but I think
he would have appreciated this joke.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
18 Apr
18 Apr
6:37 p.m.
Norman Wilson writes:
What is Dennis's character? Is he very
humorous? Thank you.
Well, this isn't specifically about his character, but the story
of how I first met Ken and Dennis is amusing. And it was a long
time ago so some of the details may be slightly off.
I was a summer student working on the second floor of Building 2.
My MO was to bike up to the labs every morning, and I do mean up
if you've ever been on Glenside Road. I would work until dinner
time, bike home, have dinner, borrow the car, and go back to the
labs and work until I was almost too tired to drive home. In the
wee hours one night I was waiting for something to run and was
getting hungry, so I headed up the the food machines in the attic
on the 6th floor. While I was waiting for my food I heard a very
mechanical sounding voice going "fuck fuck fuck fuck ...". I had
to investigate. Under a heating duct there was a door with a
frosted glass window on which was an 8 1/2 x 11 piece of paper on
which the word UNIX was spelled out in black electrical tape. It
was the source of the sound. I opened the door and discovered Ken
and Dennis and maybe some others playing with their recently
acquired Votrax speech synthesizer which they were teaching to
swear. I also remember in later weeks that it would announce
"x o'clock and all is well" on the hour where x was the current hour.
I think that maybe everyone was high on the smell of the developer
for the C/A/T paper.
Jon
19 Apr
19 Apr
2:10 p.m.
I hung out with Dennis at various conferences and had various emails with
him over the year. He was usually quiet but did have a wry sense of
humor.
Mostly at the conferences, he was content to hang out with us in the lobby
or wherever. If you didn't know who he was, he looked just like the rest
of the UNIX geeks.
He was very caring, and I got a condolence email on the passing of a
colleague. The most unexpected one was that back in the day on one of the
mailing lists, I think it was INFO-MICRO and not UNIX-WIZARDS, someone was
talking about since Andrew Fluegelman had died recently and he is generally
credited with the idea of shareware, that it be renamed fluegelwaer in his
honor. In my rebuttal I suggested that we rename the C compiler Ritchie.
I got a quick "Let's nip this in the bud right now" letter from Dennis.
One year while working for the Army I made up a bunch of No Ada t=-shirts
and sold them at one of the conferences. I gave Dennis one and I always
got a chuckle when I saw pictures of him wearing it later. If you have
Peter Salus's UNIX history book, there's a picture of him wearing it there.
1:47 p.m.
于 April 18, 2019 4:09:31 PM UTC, Norman Wilson <norman(a)oclsc.org> 写到:
What is Dennis's character? Is he very humorous?
Thank you.
He was more humorous when he was still alive, but I think
he would have appreciated this joke.
Norman Wilson
Toronto ON
I don't no.
Caipenghui
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