Conversations w/ Computing's historical personages (was: Historical origin of cron's day-of-month/weekday behavior?)

Joshua Judson Rosen rozzin at geekspace.com
Wed Oct 26 00:19:37 EDT 2011


John Abreau <jabr at blu.org> writes:
>
> >>>>>> Can anyone point me to the original author's thoughts on this?
[...]
> I emailed Brian about it last night, and found out that he didn't
> have anything to do with cron, despite the Wikipedia articles
> that credit him with it. He pointed me to Ken Thompson and
> Doug McIlroy as possible authors.
> 
> Ken tells me that the behavior I expected was exactly how his
> original cron behaved, and he speculated that the current
> "buggy" behavior, as he put it, must have been introduced later.

This has always been one of my favourite things about the unix world--
and, to some extent, computing in general: that the founders are
still around, and many of them even *respond to e-mail*.
The analogies for other domains are things like `exchanging
post-cards with Thomas Jefferson or Florence Nightingale'.

It's changing, though. :(

Not have we lost Steve Jobs (for better or worse) *and* Dennis Ritchie,
this month, but we've *also* just lost John McCarthy:

    http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/creator-of-lisp-john-mccarthy-dead-at-84/

-- 
"Don't be afraid to ask (λf.((λx.xx) (λr.f(rr))))."



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