Doug McIlroy vs Chuck Norris

Jon 'maddog' Hall maddog at li.org
Thu Apr 7 12:32:55 EDT 2011


For those of you who are unfortunate enough never to have met him, let
me just say that Doug is one of those giants whose shoulders we are
always standing on.

However, he is a quiet, humble giant, and if you never studied the
history of Unix, or computer science in general you probably would not
know them, since Doug would certainly would not volunteer to tell you
his contributions.

Last year I went to a presentation up at DSLUG in Hanover and there was
Doug sitting in the audience. After the presentation I was talking to
some of his students and mentioned something about Doug's contributions
and they were astonished. He had never mentioned his past to them in
class.

I was proud to be the chairman of the USENIX awards committee the year
we offered the two awards (STUG and Lifetime Achievement) to Doug, but
even those awards could not top this list:

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sinclair/doug/

Warmest regards,

maddog



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