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fllc · 06-21-2018, 07:41 PM

Yeah, knc1 is pretty old... Here is some trivia about him collected over the years.

The letters from Ada Lovelace to knc1 are on display at the Smithsonian. His letters to her are in the British museum.

Alan Turing's trans-Atlantic telegrams to knc1 are in the NSA archives; they were only declassified in 1991.

The preface to Donald Knuth's 400000 page "The art of computer programming" describes how knc1 critiqued the manuscript causing Knuth 9-year long rewrite. (When I was in college, one of my professors forced us to use the marked-up manuscript because Knuth was delaying volume 255 publication!)

When Grace Hopper wanted to nominate knc1 to lead the development of COBOL in 1964, knc1 famously said that he wouldn't even consider a Macro-Assembler; real programmers write in hex!

The dedication page on my dog-eared copy of 1977 Beta edition of K&R "The C programming language" reads: to knc1, without whom there would be no Unix or C.

In 1979 the US Department of Defense designed a new multi-purpose language that they wanted to name knc1/L, but had to rename it ADA because knc1 name was still classified.

In 1980, when IBM wanted to buy CP/M and was refused, they had to call knc1 out of retirement. According to a well-publicized story, after painful deliberation, knc1 introduced his great-great-grandnephew Bill Gates to IBM.

Did you know that Sergey (Brin) keeps a miniature statue of knc1 on his desk?

Readers (not hackers or programmers) in this forum easily recognized that the character "Ove" in Fredrik Backman's novel is based on knc1. Backman was very cryptic about it in the Acknowledgments but confessed in "60 minutes" interview.

And closer to home: all Mobileread youngsters (such as NiLuJe, TwoBob and others) working on their PHD's had to put knc1 as co-author on their thesis in order to post unmolested on Kindle developers forum.

My personal story: I have been retired for many years. But I remember when I was in my first job (using PDP-8 and paper tape), knc1 was a featured guest at the opening of our new datacenter. He regaled us with the stories how he had to crawl inside the Univac Mark-II and using jumper cables on vacuum tubes to fix bugs in real-time! That's embedded systems!

BTW, Mobileread still uses knc1-developed editor that purposely does not differentiate between "your" and "you're" or "there", "their" and "they're".

06-21-2018, 07:41 PM	#14
fllc has been Posts: 55 Karma: 765322 Join Date: Feb 2015 Device: k2, k4nt, touch, PW2, koa2, pw4, Nook GLP 7.8	Yeah, knc1 is pretty old... Here is some trivia about him collected over the years. The letters from Ada Lovelace to knc1 are on display at the Smithsonian. His letters to her are in the British museum. Alan Turing's trans-Atlantic telegrams to knc1 are in the NSA archives; they were only declassified in 1991. The preface to Donald Knuth's 400000 page "The art of computer programming" describes how knc1 critiqued the manuscript causing Knuth 9-year long rewrite. (When I was in college, one of my professors forced us to use the marked-up manuscript because Knuth was delaying volume 255 publication!) When Grace Hopper wanted to nominate knc1 to lead the development of COBOL in 1964, knc1 famously said that he wouldn't even consider a Macro-Assembler; real programmers write in hex! The dedication page on my dog-eared copy of 1977 Beta edition of K&R "The C programming language" reads: to knc1, without whom there would be no Unix or C. In 1979 the US Department of Defense designed a new multi-purpose language that they wanted to name knc1/L, but had to rename it ADA because knc1 name was still classified. In 1980, when IBM wanted to buy CP/M and was refused, they had to call knc1 out of retirement. According to a well-publicized story, after painful deliberation, knc1 introduced his great-great-grandnephew Bill Gates to IBM. Did you know that Sergey (Brin) keeps a miniature statue of knc1 on his desk? Readers (not hackers or programmers) in this forum easily recognized that the character "Ove" in Fredrik Backman's novel is based on knc1. Backman was very cryptic about it in the Acknowledgments but confessed in "60 minutes" interview. And closer to home: all Mobileread youngsters (such as NiLuJe, TwoBob and others) working on their PHD's had to put knc1 as co-author on their thesis in order to post unmolested on Kindle developers forum. My personal story: I have been retired for many years. But I remember when I was in my first job (using PDP-8 and paper tape), knc1 was a featured guest at the opening of our new datacenter. He regaled us with the stories how he had to crawl inside the Univac Mark-II and using jumper cables on vacuum tubes to fix bugs in real-time! That's embedded systems! BTW, Mobileread still uses knc1-developed editor that purposely does not differentiate between "your" and "you're" or "there", "their" and "they're".