2016-02-09



That's the reason why Unix exists and also the key  to  any  suc-
cessful research:

     When a new researcher is hired  here  anywhere  in  the
     research area, he or she is hired because of a doctoral
     thesis or some other track record that indicates profi-
     ciency, creativity in some field that we are interested
     in.

     When the person comes in the department head's business
     is  not  to  tell  the individual what to do but to see
     that he or she gets introduced to folks with common in-
     terests  or  perhaps  common interests and that various
     people come around and ask questions, try  and  consult
     with  the  person,  and  we suggest that a new employee
     spend considerable amount of time, up  even  to  a  few
     months, thinking about what he or she would like to do.
     Very often publishing the Ph.D. thesis is a good  thing
     to start on.

     But anyway, people essentially found their  own  things
     to  do influenced by the total environment they are in.
     And if a person wants to undertake a  certain  line  of
     research,  a  certain kind of investigation, presumably
     because of the individual's technical background before
     coming here this would something that's in a field that
     is of interest to Bell Labs and we allow this  to  con-
     tinue. And if the person seems to be getting somewhere,
     seems to be interacting with people and well  seems  to
     be  making  some progress, and particularly seems to be
     communicating with his or her colleagues a considerable
     length  of  time  can  go on before the department head
     try's to steer the person in some other direction. [0]

With this knowledge of the situation in the Bell Labs back  then,
one can much better understand how something like awk (Aho, Wein-
berger & Kernighan) came to existence.


     The MULTICS people were told, ``we  are  not  going  to
     provide you with a large computer for a small number of
     people to do  time  shared  system  research  on''.  We
     didn't  tell  them  what  they  should do. We told them
     various things that we were not going to buy  equipment
     for.  And  so,  that's  standard operating practice for
     researchers. They are suppose to be able to find things
     to do and so eventually they did.

... and invented Unix. :-)

[0]  Sam                                                   Morgan
(http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/morgan.htm)


http://marmaro.de/lue/        markus schnalke <meillo@marmaro.de>