That's exactly the point. The author's name appears in the source code listing and it's in a different font. It looks like somebody pasted it on afterwards.
Maybe this is just an artefact of the way these program samples were generated, but it's pretty obvious that the author's name in the 'author' comment at the foot of the left-hand column on page seven (of the pdf of the original complaint letter) is in a completely different font to that of the rest of the code on that page: check out for instance the 'g' character.
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[Dennis] Ritchie and [Ken] Thompson joined Bell Labs within a year of each other, Thompson in 1966 and Ritchie in 1967. They worked closely together for several years on the design and development of UNIX. The C Language, in which the UNIX operating system is written, was invented by Ritchie. It grew out of an earlier language, B, written by Thompson. (link)
It's quite possible that this code can be credited to BSD
I don't think so. Look at a Unix timeline and you will see that this code, which appears to have been written around the beginning of 1973, predates not only BSD but all other C/Unix versions. It's effectively been there since day one.
The nsys kernel version of malloc has exactly the same implementation, albeit without any comments.
Dennis Ritchie has writtenSo far as I can determine, this is the earliest version of Unix that currently exists in machine-readable form.... The dates on the transcription are hard to interpret correctly; if my program that interprets the image are correct, the files were last touched on 22 Jan, 1973....
The 1973 nsys version of malloc.c is virtually identical.
The file is in a directory called 'dmr'. There's a parallel directory named 'ken'.
Ritchie has written (re. the nsys kernel) that So far as I can determine, this is the earliest version of the Unix kernel that currently exists in machine-readable form.
A programmer (and most certainly not a lawyer) writes: The answer, almost certainly, is (spooky music) the bank.
It seems to me that your best bet might be to put a notice in the appropriate publication(s) announcing your intention to appropriate the code and ask whether anybody has a stronger claim to it than you. Then cross your fingers and hope that nobody takes the bait.
That's essentially what the bank would do if it found a deposit box full of stuff and it couldn't determine the owner.
One question one might ask is whether your employers allowed you to take copies of (their) source code off site, and if so, why.
These people state that their 'patented keystroke dynamics technology, a proprietary algorithm to make biometric measurements of a keyboard user's individual typing rhythm' was originally developed by SRI between 1979 and 1985. 'Today, the company has re-engineered keystroke dynamics into a software only biometric solution for user authentication in modern computers.'
The main good thing is that PostScript drawings/documents are scalable. The printer itself handles the rendering of vector graphics into a bitmap, taking into account the printer's resolution and colour capability.
Of course there's no reason why the computer couldn't do the rendering itself (assuming it knows the properties of the target printer), but at higher resolutions the bitmaps can be pretty damned big, so it makes a lot more sense just to send the vectors. (300dpi counted as a high resolution in the early 80's when computers were slow and memory was expensive.)
But once you've designed a document format which has 'moveto', 'lineto', 'scale' and 'transform' primitives it's only a small step on the slippery slope to include 'add' and 'sub'. Then some way of producing error messages would be nice, and on it goes. Soon it makes more sense just to make a general purpose language (with added graphics primitives.)
The main strength of PostScript as a general purpose programming language is that there's no great distinction between programs and data; in writing a PostScript program you are effectively creating an executable data structure. This can be pretty powerful.
It's main weaknesses are its poor string handling (which is a bit ironic) and the fact that it can be a bugger to debug.
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That's exactly the point. The author's name appears in the source code listing and it's in a different font. It looks like somebody pasted it on afterwards.
Maybe this is just an artefact of the way these program samples were generated, but it's pretty obvious that the author's name in the 'author' comment at the foot of the left-hand column on page seven (of the pdf of the original complaint letter) is in a completely different font to that of the rest of the code on that page: check out for instance the 'g' character.
hmm, there's a job - gunpowder packer-downer...
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What were vector processors like 25 years ago? The Cray-1 (1977) peaked at 240 MFlops.
Admittedly the Cray needed its own power station to run; but speedwise, a one-hundred fold increase in 25 years seems quite reasonable.
[Dennis] Ritchie and [Ken] Thompson joined Bell Labs within a year of each other, Thompson in 1966 and Ritchie in 1967. They worked closely together for several years on the design and development of UNIX. The C Language, in which the UNIX operating system is written, was invented by Ritchie. It grew out of an earlier language, B, written by Thompson. (link)
I don't think so. Look at a Unix timeline and you will see that this code, which appears to have been written around the beginning of 1973, predates not only BSD but all other C/Unix versions. It's effectively been there since day one.
Dennis Ritchie has written So far as I can determine, this is the earliest version of Unix that currently exists in machine-readable form. ... The dates on the transcription are hard to interpret correctly; if my program that interprets the image are correct, the files were last touched on 22 Jan, 1973. ...
The file is in a directory called 'dmr'. There's a parallel directory named 'ken'.
Ritchie has written (re. the nsys kernel) that So far as I can determine, this is the earliest version of the Unix kernel that currently exists in machine-readable form.
This match was pointed out in a SlashDot article on Jun 19
Beri-beri is a nutritional deficiency (vitamin B1, aka thiamin); maybe you are thinking of kuru
Interestingly MCCI has suffered mistaken identity previously
It seems to me that your best bet might be to put a notice in the appropriate publication(s) announcing your intention to appropriate the code and ask whether anybody has a stronger claim to it than you. Then cross your fingers and hope that nobody takes the bait. That's essentially what the bank would do if it found a deposit box full of stuff and it couldn't determine the owner.
One question one might ask is whether your employers allowed you to take copies of (their) source code off site, and if so, why.
These people state that their 'patented keystroke dynamics technology, a proprietary algorithm to make biometric measurements of a keyboard user's individual typing rhythm' was originally developed by SRI between 1979 and 1985. 'Today, the company has re-engineered keystroke dynamics into a software only biometric solution for user authentication in modern computers.'
The main good thing is that PostScript drawings/documents are scalable. The printer itself handles the rendering of vector graphics into a bitmap, taking into account the printer's resolution and colour capability. Of course there's no reason why the computer couldn't do the rendering itself (assuming it knows the properties of the target printer), but at higher resolutions the bitmaps can be pretty damned big, so it makes a lot more sense just to send the vectors. (300dpi counted as a high resolution in the early 80's when computers were slow and memory was expensive.) But once you've designed a document format which has 'moveto', 'lineto', 'scale' and 'transform' primitives it's only a small step on the slippery slope to include 'add' and 'sub'. Then some way of producing error messages would be nice, and on it goes. Soon it makes more sense just to make a general purpose language (with added graphics primitives.) The main strength of PostScript as a general purpose programming language is that there's no great distinction between programs and data; in writing a PostScript program you are effectively creating an executable data structure. This can be pretty powerful. It's main weaknesses are its poor string handling (which is a bit ironic) and the fact that it can be a bugger to debug.
Or take a look at http://www.rops.org -- Roger