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Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website
- newscracker 3y agoThe wayback machine has snapshots of this, including one taken today, June 4. [1] I hope the current error is just something transient and will be resolved soon. I also hope someone has contacts for the website to alert them. [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.bell...
- ilaksh 3y agoI did not receive any error.
- lolinder 3y agoWhat error are you seeing? I'm seeing the same page in the archive as on the live site.
- nkozyra 3y agoIf you reload it you'll get a periodic 503. It's not consistent.
- WackyWeasel 3y agoI can see occassionally "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" errors too. Also DMR's picture is "broken". Maybe the server is temporarily overloaded by the number of visits caused by this post. After all, it's an archived homepage and likely not running on the most performant webserver.
- LorenDB 3y agoDon't worry, it's probably just the ol' HN hug o' death.
- fragmede 3y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20230115172142/https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230115172142/https://www.bell-...
- ilaksh 3y agoHe mentions Plan 9. Reading that Wikipedia lead to the Inferno operating system. Which mentions a focus on portability and a file interface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) That reminds me of web assembly and WASI. So this is tangential but how is the component stuff in web assembly doing? It seemed like such a great idea to me but apparently, at least at one point, was somehow controversial or political. Also, I wonder if it would be possible to port Inferno to web assembly.
- pjmlp 3y agoBasically WebAssembly is anything but new. You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.
- ori_b 3y agoThough, wasm has a high level structure that makes it a clunky compilation target. The bytecodes above improve on wasm in that regard.
- pjmlp 3y agoSpecially to note is the history of C, where he acknowledges the issues with C and the creation of lint for static analysis (in 1979), or his proposal for fat pointers, that wasn't accepted by WG14.
- xyst 3y agoHe worked for bell labs since ‘67 before his death? Wow, absolutely unheard of now. I’ll have to read a few of his papers now.
- petepete 3y agoI love the OtherUnix page. There's a link to a Hungarian company called Unix Autó who have a product called InfoMix - which I initially scanned as Informix. That would've been a coincidence too far.
- CodeCompost 3y agoWhat happens when you phone the number?
- SoftTalker 3y agoA number of academics seem to have very simple HTML pages like this one. See Knuth's page for example. Most of the Comp Sci professors at my school had pages like this also. Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect. Fortunately there's reader mode.
- boringuser2 3y ago[flagged]
- phist_mcgee 3y agoThat's a feature, not a bug.
- shrimp_emoji 3y agoThe apotheosis of Design is using a SPA that breaks your browser's functionality (tabs, back button, all that shit) while on the GNOME desktop. I.e., being in paradise.
- taopai 3y agoI like websites like this. Simple fast, and, as you say, you can use reader mode. Some people have blogs like this arguing that the user should have the power to customize his experience, for example, using a custom CSS. So they deliver plain html, with a very basic CSS sheet.
- phkahler 3y ago>> Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. It's HTML where the whole point is to reflow to fit your window. YOU determine the page width and the content reflows to fit. The problem was when it took off and a bunch of publishers and print people came along and demanded control over the layout. Now they even have custom fonts FFS.
- codegeek 3y agoObligatory HN details: - No CSS on the page - No JS on the page - Gif for image - Static site hosted using Nginx and plain old /www folder - For some reason, reasonably responsive on mobile Did I miss anything ? Oh yea, superfast page load.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pfdietz 3y agoI see no mention of family beyond siblings. Was he not married/in a relationship? I realize some people don't want that, but it's always made me sad even so.
- ReactiveJelly 3y agoNothing on his Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#Personal_life_and_career https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#Personal_life_a... It does make me sad, because I know a lot of people who shelter themselves in computers, always wanting something more out in the real world but never being able to get their comfort zone wide enough to achieve it.
- emkemp 3y agoHe reportedly was never in a relationship. This comes from unidentified members of the Ritchie family who set up a web site focussed mostly on his unpublished PhD thesis. The site includes some personal information on his life. From https://dmrthesis.net/story-and-question/ https://dmrthesis.net/story-and-question/ (near the bottom) "In his adult years Dennis had a reputation for being famously private.... There were topics that were completely off limits with Dennis – mostly having to do with any form of personal intimacy. This was true for his Bell Labs colleagues, who speak of Dennis’ personal life as a kind of private zone where they do not tread, and true with his siblings also. This was just his way. "As an adult, Dennis lived an ascetic lifestyle. In September 1967, he moved back into the attic of his family home and set up a home office in the basement, where he lived with his parents until 1989. He worked from 1PM until 3AM six days a week, Sundays off for reading. He had no friends outside of his business colleagues, he rarely socialized, he did not have (nor never had) a relationship with anyone, he wouldn’t talk about/acknowledge discussion about emotional issues in any form. (He did have a wonderful family who loved him dearly and whom he loved dearly as well.) It was almost as if he needed to blot out any awareness of his personal life from the world by using the strategy of having no personal life to be observed. "This affect wasn’t just something neutral, it could be an active force."
- emkemp 3y agoI should add, on the same page, there is an excerpt of an interview with his sister Lynn who set Dennis up with a friend for her junior prom. So he at least dated. More broadly: "As a youth Dennis was social and outgoing, then in young adulthood he transformed quite rapidly to become more private and anti-social. Hard to pin down exactly when this would have been happening… except that clues from John and Lynn’s interviews suggest perhaps sometime around February 1968 might be central."
- taopai 3y ago"My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat." Thank god I am not the only one!
- pfdietz 3y agoIn fairness, I'm not sure the return to society of minting another physicist is all that high. Many seem to go into computing anyway.
- taopai 3y agoWell I think undergrad just stamps a label in your forehead. What you do in your free time, most important, what job you get and who seriously you jump into it is what determines your value to society. Carsten Dominik, another physicist, was the creator of org-mode. I don't think physicist have an advantage over CS graduates, in fact reading code written by physicists is like watching and horror movie. But everyone can contribute a tiny bit. You are right, a lot of my friends, who studied physics, take the jobs CS undergrads don't want to do, and get really low salaries...
- vincent-manis 3y agoI started university in 1967, intending to study physics. Unfortunately, Physics was at 0830, and I soon discovered that I liked physics, but not enough to get to campus reliably at that time. Fortunately, Computer Science was at 1630. My academic career was thus determined.
- twobitshifter 3y ago>I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era. This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder how many of Richie’s accomplishments were due to Bell and what could he have done outside of Bell on his own path? I’m thinking that living in an attic while accomplishing great CS feats is a delicate balance that might have only happened at Bell with his parents support. But is there another timeline where he sees the weaknesses at Bell and ends up somewhere else in Silicon Valley?
- mwbajor 3y agoAre you saying that these smart Bell Labs guys could be put to better use coming up with SW to more efficiently bombard you with ads? Because right now, that seems like the only thing making SV reliable money and the only thing that could support long term basic research... but doesnt.
- OldGuyInTheClub 3y agoA lot of people would stay at Bell Labs because of the culture of frictionless internal collaborations. Don't know about SV, but my senior colleagues and managers all had multiple stories of fending off Universities recruiting their staff. Being reminded them of the freewheeling open-door nature of the place that Universities could not duplicate, a lot of sought-after people stayed put. Not to mention no committee work, grantwriting, or teaching. But, the company fully expected to lose people to MIT, Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, and other places. It was a point of pride that they could recruit young people of that caliber. Those who did choose to go usually left on good terms with Bell donating lab equipment and staying in touch for access to future students and postdocs. Source: Physical sciences postdoc in the early 1990s before it went over the cliff and before SV became what it is today
- rramadass 3y agoThe World would be a much better place if current-day companies practiced such a culture. The way our current "Work Culture" is setup, it is destroying people's lives.