Pierre and his Poor Pathetic Page
Personalities section
Main Menu
Miscellaneous
- Computers
- Personalities
- Science!
(Vers version francaise)
Map of this section:
Movies and television
- Computers
Movies and television
Dick Cavett's Blog
September 9, 2011
Cavett is a man of culture and humor who has hosted
excellent talk shows starting in the sixties.
Vartox Salutes Benjamin Kubelsky
October 3, 2000
Benjamin Kubelsky (1894-1974) was the real name of
Jack Benny, a legendary American comedian.
What's All This Muntzing Stuff, Anyhow?
September 9, 1998
The muntzing technique, attributed to the legendary
TV salesman Earl Muntz
should be known by more engineers and programmers...
Groucho Marx
June 27, 1998
This site is dedicated to the wit,
wisdom and life of Groucho Marx.
One can find several one-liners and
.wav sound files.
Dead People Server
January 3, 1998
A site that will inform you on the state of the "health" of a
great number of celebrities. Dates of birth and death are given,
as well as the cause of death.
Computers
W. Richard Stevens
September 1, 2000
W. Richard Stevens is the author of
TCP/IP Illustrated,
Unix Network Programming and
Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment
Their influence among Unix users is hard to overstate.
Thousands of programmers all over the world consider Stevens
a guru and his works essential to their jobs.
This Salon article is about a ceremony where Stevens was
posthumously awarded the Usenix Lifetime Achievement Award.
Richard Stallman
December 29, 1999
Founder of the GNU Project,
whose goal is to write a complete free Unix system.
What is known as "Linux" is in fact a Linux kernel which is
surrounded by a lot of GNU Project utilities that make it
a functional operating system.
Stallman calls such a system "GNU/Linux".
RMS is also the co-founder of the
League for Programming Freedom,
which opposes software patents and user interface copyrights.
I have been the webmaster for the LPF website since October 1998.
John Lions
December 22, 1999
John Lions wrote the first, and perhaps only, literary criticism of Unix,
sparking one of open source's first legal battles.
Gary Kildall -- The DOS that wasn't
March 9, 1998
An article by Jeffrey Young on the late Gary Kildall,
the creator of the CP/M operating system,
of which MS-DOS was a ridiculous copy.
The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing
March 7, 1998
The late Grace Hopper was the one who invented the compiler
in 1953.
Clifford Stoll
January 3, 1998
Author of the book
The Cuckoo's Egg.
In this book, Stoll talks about the inquiry he had to do
about intrusions in the computers of his university,
in the mid-eighties.
Brian W. Kernighan
November 30, 1997
The other creator of the C language, whose site
contains a few interesting publications like
Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language,
an article that explains calmy the fundamental problems
of standard Pascal.
I would have appreciated that some of the university professors
read that text before choosing to force us to program in such
a restrictive language...
On April 12th, 1996, Brian Kernighan came to
McGill University
to give a conference on the good programming style.
He co-wrote a well known book on that subject
(B. W. Kernighan and P. J. Plauger,
The Elements of Programming Style,
McGraw-Hill, New York, 1974)
and his conference was both enlightening and amusing.
He supported his recommendations on the importance of coding
with simplicity by showing examples of very contorted code
that came, he assured us, from currently running applications.
Some of these examples were taken from the code that runs the
long-distance switching system at
AT&T...
Dennis M. Ritchie
November 29, 1997
One of the creators of the Unix operating system and
the C programming language.
There is a photo of him, a short history of
Bell Labs,
the company for which he has been working for about thirty years,
and electronic copies of some articles on the history of
Unix, C, the vi editor, etc.
Dennis Ritchie answered a question I asked in November 1997
in the newsgroup alt.folklore.computers
about the attitude of
AT&T
towards the Unix versions created by the University of Berkeley.
See the text of his article.
Donald E. Knuth
October 18, 1997
The venerable legend who needs no presentation...
Bjarne Stroustrup
October 8, 1997
Creator of the C++ programming language,
whose Web site contains a FAQ list that wil attempt
to reveal to you how this curious danish name is pronounced.
Main Menu
Miscellaneous
- Computers
- Personalities
- Science!