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

[Jon "maddog" Hall]

and...last November....Sir Maurice Wilkes, head of the EDSAC project,
the first computer to store its own program, inventor of microcode,
bit-slice computing, and subroutine libraries.

A true gentleman.

maddog

On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 00:19 -0400, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
> 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/
> 

-- 
Jon "maddog" Hall
Executive Director           Linux International(R)
email: maddog at li.org         80 Amherst St. 
Voice: +1.603.673.7875       Amherst, N.H. 03031-3032 U.S.A.
WWW: http://www.li.org

Board Member: Uniforum Association
Board Member Emeritus: USENIX Association (2000-2006)

(R)Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in several
countries.
(R)Linux International is a registered trademark in the USA used
pursuant
   to a license from Linux Mark Institute, authorized licensor of Linus
   Torvalds, owner of the Linux trademark on a worldwide basis
(R)UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the USA and other
   countries.