Slashdot Mirror
Ken Thompson's Last Day At Bell Labs
A reader writes: "I was doing some research on Bell-Labs, and I stumbled across
Ken Thompson's
Chess page. ( that's not the interesting part )
The interesting part is that at the top he says that he's leaving Bell
Labs yesterday - Dec 1 2000, to pursue flight instruction full time.
I dont know about everyone else, but it
seems sort of important that one of the co-creators of Unix appears
to be retiring."
Fucking supermodels.
Just like all hackers after an all-night coding session. Right?
Reminds me of an old line: "When I die, I want to go like my grandfather did, gently while sleeping, and not like his passangers, screaming in a panic, looking for the inflatable raft."
Linux, I am your father.
Well, err, umm, at one point, there was a "Dave Cutler's Fan Club Page" - see the reference to it in one of the comments in this Slashdot article - but it seems to have disappeared.
You are very good at something does not mean you what to do it for the rest of life. Ken just has other goals in his life so he wishes to pursue them. More power to ya Ken
Ken's retirement is indicative of the amazing progress that we've made in the last 30 years. If you look at what's been built on his foundation in that time, it's rather mind-boggling. Ken's invention became a crucial part of the foundation for a global Internet that has had far-reaching effects on human society worldwide.
Certainly, a major milestone in the life of one of the founders of the technology which we all use heavily, is an event worthy of note.
Bill Atkinson (creator of much of the Mac's user interface, developer of QuickDraw, MacPaint and Hypercard) is now a photographer. (Personally, I think his stint at General Magic burned him out on programming.)
Stupid job ads, weird spam, occasional insight at
Well, Arno Pendias (Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of cosmic background radiation) is a HELL of a lot bigger name than any of the computer folks, and he still works part time at Bell Labs.
Uh, well Ken Thompson actually helped do the gruntwork WRITING an OS that's lasted this long. Gates is not on the same level- he can't take credit for the windows code the way Thompson can for UNIX.
I hope he was given a gold Itsy at the retirement party.
Ken helped make a good OS. Stallman changed the way we'll think about software, forever.
I can guarantee all of you wouldn't be talking about how great UNIX is if you were paying Bell Labs' license fees.
Ken, thanks. RMS - thanks++.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Was Rob Pike looking for a job at Microsoft Research when this was reported here on /.?
If the old Bell Labs is imploding, it would be a terrible shame.
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Windows 3.1 - Perhaps the last version of Windows to actually contain some innovative stuff (TrueType springs to mind).
And TrueType was developed by Apple.
Recall also that KT showed how even open source cannot be trusted.
Unix on the other hand has been extended, but its core concepts have not been removed. It is a testament to good design.
I have to agree with another poster about the hero worship thing and the lack of criticsm.
With regards to Linux - there is a classic and well known email debate between Linus Torvalds and Andy Tanembaum (it is reproduced in the back of a book about Linux, someone must know the reference, I forget it) where first the argument begins about Linux and Minix, and the purpose of Linux and why it tries to be different from Minix, but the significant points in the discussion are the criticism of Linux not being microkernel based, or being a truly distributed operating system. These criticisms are invalid if you just want a stand alone operating system, but they are valid if you want the "next generation operating system for the computing world" that Linux is often touted at being (when it was not designed to be that, and has sort of evolved into being it in a fuzzy way). One only has to look at the criticisms levied at DLLs and shared libraries (although, they are sort of at the periphery). By virtue of being ported to many platforms, Linux does have a sort of "ad hoc" microkernel.
I am sure many academics and specialists in operating systems would have to agree that Linux is not designed from the ground up to embody the state of the art operating system approachs, but rather it has sort of evolved that way simply because of mass popularity - what people really want to do now and in the future is distributed computing, and Linux does this not in an inherent way.
In the same way, people in the field of information engineering will tell you that they wish Tim Berners Lee did not invent HTML, because the internet as it has become should have been based on something else (which is why XML/Java/etc is now taking over, if only because people are finding engineering problems with using HTML, and realise now how XML/Java/etc scales better). That's not to say that TBL did not do something amazing for humanity, because he did, and obviously he did not forsee what was going to happen, and he cannot be denied that acclaim, but it is fair to make objective criticism about the technologies being used.
Coming back to Linux - the importance of Linux is not so much in the nature of the operating system itself, but lies in the development model (global community, open source, etc) that can be seen as a culmination of many things before it (GNU, fsf, ietf, etc). An analogy is in the fine arts : in the history of fine arts, there are masterpieces, and those are undoubtedly masterpieces, and it is possible to trace the developments of style and technical issues to understand how they was evolving and then took full force in a particular masterpiece - for instance, the amazing works of the mid renaissance are built upon the developments of brunelleschi, giotto and leonardo da vinci who pioneered the development of perspective and broke away from classicism. So, the similiarity is that Linux is a sort of masterpiece that embodies a suite of many different things that were evolving - unfortunately, the internal technical construction of Linux is definitely not state of the art, and I am sure experts would agree, unfortunately many of the people on Slashdot are not experts or academics and do not have extensive experience or understanding of operating systems.
The sad thing is that the mass popularity driving Linux is now upsetting companies that were developing seriously robust operating systems (e.g. real time operating systems for embedded systems), and perhaps they will have problems funding the kind of research that should be carried out into operating system design.
-- Matthew - matthew.gream@pobox.com, http://matthewgream.net
Take a look at where he writes about his trip to moscow to fly the MIG 29 and L 39 trainers.
Oh yeah, so long Ken. You've done great things that helped a lot of people get through their day.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
I sure hope he posts his flight training syllabus somewhere on the Net. I can only imagine what it's going to look like. Hmmmmmm, wonder if this means we will see more flight training and planning software coming out...
Dammy
Comm/Multi/Inst Fixed/Land
BGI/AGI/IGI
. In recent years Thompson has gone on the record saying negative things about Linux and not really getting the whole picture.
Well, you say "whole picture" as some sort of objective truth; maybe he interprets the whole picture differently than the linux community. His claims aren't particularly outrageous; he said that the code quality in linux varies (I think few people will argue with that), and that while it's fine for a PC, it's not that great for embedded systems or firewalls. Now that last part is definitely debatable, but considering this one of the men that a) created UNIX, and b) has been involved in the OS field for 30 years or so, I think he definitely has a right to make those kinds of judgements. More so than the average linux coder, who seems only to know MS and linux.
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Sometime this month. Forgot the exact date. Cheers, e.
I think that's a L39 Albatross trainer on the second link.
Calum
Or something like that anyway...
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You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
"I'll grant that Unix may not have been what it was without Ken, but was the institutional culture such at Bell Labs that Bell Labs would have come out with something similar to Unix even if he had never been involved?"
In a word, no. I'm sure you think you're being very clever as you ask this rhetorical question. However, if you had even the faintest idea about the early history of Unix, you'd realize how off-track you are being. Without Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, there would have been no UNIX or UNIX-like operating system at Bell Labs at all.
Bell Labs management didn't ask for a simple OS coded in a HLL at all. KT and DR just went ahead and did it for their own reasons. I do attibute the success of Unix to "institutional culture" (Bell Labs providing a happy little sandbox for people to play in, Bell Labs not being able to commercialize Unix immediately because of the consent decree). However, no such project would have ever happened without the individual contributions of two very unique and talented personalities.
By all means criticize Slashdot heroes, if you like. I don't worship everything that came out of the Unix Room at Bell Labs or idolize KT et al. But get your facts correct, first.
i dunno maybe he means "SECOND POST"???
Visit my website xpenguin.com -- A linux penguin website
[I'm laughing that I got modded down for trolling, anyway...]
You're right that there's certainly some hero worship everywhere, I guess on Slashdot in particular it goes too far, especially when it comes to Linus who never seems to get ANY criticism.
Sure, he's done an amazing job steering Linux in addition to the early coding he's done. But in the here-and-now, how much of the actual 2.4 kernel is he personally responsible for coding? Any of it, or just a lot of leftover bits from 2.2 or 2.0?
The other thing that rankles me is that many of these people are being given personal credit for an institutional product that might have been developed anyway, with or without them. I'll grant that Unix may not have been what it was without Ken, but was the institutional culture such at Bell Labs that Bell Labs would have come out with something similar to Unix even if he had never been involved?
The same holds true for Linux. Sure, it wouldn't have been Linux but it's also not like it's the only open sourced Unix around. Given the nature of the BSD world, why wouldn't someone else have said "Let's do a free Unix from scratch."
The counterpoint is something like Windows 2000. Now, you may think its the worst thing in the world, but we never hear about Max Microserf and his great contributions to Win2k, primarily because we rightly see the institutional nature of Win2k and don't associate the major personality Bill Gates with the actual coding or force behind its technical development.
Mostly its the herosim and lack of critcism of the Slashdot heroes list that bugs me. I'm all for lauding the contributions of individuals, but I'm also sure that these same individuals are very open to criticism that they'll never get precisely because of the hero worship.
Bill Gates emptying Port-O-Lets.
"oh what a relief it whiz..."
-'fester
I've never seen what he looks like, but I'm guessing the Unix engineer is the heavy-set bald guy with a bushy beard.
well, who is the man going to pass the torch onto? i mean, all of the great minds throughout history have an understudy who either turns out evil or succeeds again. but seriously, it seems like the old guard of technology is being replaced by profit-driven dot-com people. is that the direction we want to take?
it seems sort of important that one of the co-creators of Unix appears to be retiring
Er yes. People retire. This is not unusual - its what they do when they get old, whether they created Unix, Windows or Novelty Mugs...
-Tom
And holding a cup of coffee too.
Commencing countdown, major ken.......
FP for the man
Ed Roberts, founder of MITS and creator of the Altair 8800 (widely acknowledged as the first personal computer), is now a small-town doctor.
Ken Thompson, co-creator of Unix, is now a flight instructor.
What's next? Douglas Engelbart becoming a professional bowler? Tim Berners-Lee realizing his life-long dream of becoming a plumber?
99% of the world would like to think of Mr. Gates as the father of the operating system revolution - but the remaining 1% of the world who use and appreciate the elegance of Ken Thompson's work are enough to make him a character sorely missed from the field of computing...
I think I speak for everyone here when I say "THANKS FOR EVERYTHING KEN!!"
"Hmmm.... they have the Internet on computers now ?" - Homer Simpson
"Be vewy vewy quiet, I'm hunting wuntime ewwors!" - Elmer Fudd
Yeah, sure, it starts out all innocent. He's just flying planes, right?
Hmm, next thing you know he's taking lessons at SpaceCamp. Just a retirement hobby...
Then first thing you know he's launched himself into space (who wouldn't want to curry favor with the phone company?), and is paradropping Plan 9 media kits into Linux/*BSD strongholds.
Yes, it could be pretty successful, dropping Plan 9 from Outer Space...
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