20 Years Ago in UNIX

Note another change in title! ;login: (a.k.a. UNIX NEWS) did not reappear until 1980. I wrote last issue that I'd talk about the Association and its activities in 1999. But I'd like to say a bit about UNIX, too.

1978 saw the appearance of Version 7, the first BSD tape (containing Pascal and "the ex editor''), the Ritchie-Johnson port to the Interdata 8, the Wollongong port to the Interdata 7, the port to 32V by Charlie Roberts and a group at Holmdel, the publication of uucp, and the first meeting of the NLUUG -- and, of course, the publication of The C Programming Language and the "blue" BSTJ.

It may be worthwhile to itemize some of the things found for the first time in V7: intro (introduction to commands), adb (debugger), at, awk, calendar, cb (the C beautifier), cd, cu, deroff, expr, f77 (the Fortran 77 compiler), join, learn, lex, lint, look, m4 (a macro processor), make, sed, tabs, tail, test, touch, true, tsort, uucp; access, acct, alarm, ioctl, lseek, umask, and utime -- in Sections 1 and 2 alone. popen, scanf, stdio, string were among the subroutines; and adventure and backgammon joined chess under games. Finally, man (which I use nearly every day) was introduced.

On the other side, the beginning of 1979 saw the Internet with 150 hosts and transatlantic and transpacific connections. Original ARPANET hosts had been connected with 55K dedicated lines. The advent of the acoustic modem slowed things down. In 1978-79 I was running a DECwriter II over a 300-baud line to the IBM 360. Twenty years is a long time in technology.

The January 1979 USENIX conference was held in Santa Monica, CA. Mike O'Brien was the program chair. He wrote me: "I remember nothing about that meeting's program except for time I actually spent on stage yapping. There was an early pre-awards ceremony. I don't remember if Steve Holmgren gave his Rubber Chicken award at that time, but I know I gave one.

"Before the conference opened, Dave Yost and Armando Stettner discovered they were kindred spirits. Dave was driving some gigantic American boat of a convertible, which Armando fell in love with, especially when Armando discovered he could cause a hubcap to pop off at will by cornering it sharply. He reciprocated by demonstrating the 'Rockford Maneuver' in the RAND parking lot, using his own rental car.

"James Garner, in 'The Rockford Files,' had a habit of turning his car around by taking off in reverse at top speed, then simultaneously hauling up on the hand brake and slamming the car into Drive. This causes the car to slew around 180 degrees and keep going without appreciable loss of speed.

"What Armando didn't know is that the Santa Monica Police Department is right across the street from RAND. He was beside himself when he noticed this, a few minutes later. I was inspired.

"The next day, I ran off and scored one of the most elaborate T-shirts that the do-your-own-T-shirt shop had ever produced. They photographed it for their archives. It had a giant Cobb cartoon of one of his typical slathering bug-eyed creatures driving a flaming chop job of a race car, surrounded by the words, 'Armando P. Stettner School of Driving.' On the back was the email address of the school, 'rockford!aps'.

"I presented this to Armando at the opening Plenary Session, in front of 1500 or 2000 people. I have never seen Armando in such a state before or since.

"Another thing I remember about Santa Monica are the two innovations I made, one minor, one major. I stole both ideas from DECUS. The minor one was the timer on the speaker's podium, with green, yellow, and red lights. The major one was the USENIX BoF session. In order to level the playing field, I insisted that no reservations for BoF rooms would be accepted before the conference opened. I still believe that that choice was the right one, for I wound up beating off several vendors, who tried to reserve space weeks before the conference. The conference hotel, the Miramar, had limited space, and I wanted to favor the groups that didn't have commercial backing, and hence had no hope of getting meeting facilities outside of a BoF. I think that was the one and only year that policy was enforced, but then it's also been true that BoF space has been a lot more readily available since then.

"Dave Yost's house party, at this conference, may have been the first of the 'wizard' parties. If there was one before this one, I can't remember it offhand, except for Steve Holmgren's kegger at his house at the first east-west meeting in Shampoo-Banana. These have always been more or less elitist affairs. Dave, at that time, lived in a house in the Hollywood Hills. He ran a limousine service to and from a drug store parking lot down the hill on Sunset in order to cut down on parking problems on his own street.

"Dave also provided party favors. He had a box full of uninflated balloons, and a helium tank. Next to the helium tank, he had an oxygen tank, with a big hand-lettered sign that read, '1/3 from this tank (big arrow pointing to the oxygen) and 2/3 from this tank (big arrow pointing to the helium).' He did this because, a week or so before, he and I and some other friends went to Disneyland, where Dave did his level best to get us thrown out of the park. He came across a vendor of helium balloons and loaded up. First we went to the theater-in-the-round exhibit, which at that time was sponsored by AT&T. The young beauty who gave the opening spiel was so perfect-looking that she sort of resembled that shellacked food the Japanese put in restaurant windows. She got well into her spiel when Dave, in a completely heliumed-out voice, yelled from the back: 'That's enough of that stuff, lady! We wanna hear some real Bell System stuff!' The girl folded forward over her podium and sort of gave up for a while.

"Later, Dave was yelling this and that in a helium voice while we were in line at Big Thunder Mountain. Two gorillas in blue blazers were soon seen coming along the line, scowling and giving everyone the eye. We passed inspection.

"Finally, in the parking lot, as we were getting ready to leave, Dave used up the last of the helium, then looked at my friend, who was wearing a white cable knit sweater, and said, 'Gee, I'm sorry, looks like you got spots on your sweater.'

"She looked down and said, puzzled and frowning, 'No I didn't.'

"Dave said 'Oh!' and started taking big deep breaths, 'WHOOP-ah WHOOP-ah WHOOP-ah!'

"So, when Dave gave his UNIX Wizard's party, he made sure to have people mix oxygen with the helium. The other thing I remember at that party was Dennis Ritchie sitting on the floor with his 'happy and bemused' look."

I am gratified to note that the Conference did not seem to "break" the Association's general irreverance.

That 25-27 January was Judy DesHarnais's debut. I guess she wasn't deterred.