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Movies and television
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,
which is part of
My short list of favorite books.
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.
Steve Wozniak
(August 3, 1997)
One of the founders of Apple Computer, who is now a teacher.
The Wozscape site contains an
Interviews and Articles section that presents
a few articles, like How We Failed Apple.
Funny
Rebecca Sealfon, spelling bee champion
(February 8, 2003)
This engaging young girl carefully shouted each letter of
the word "euonym" to win the 70th National Spelling Bee in 1997.
Rebecca was 13 years old at the time.
This CNN article is accompanied by a QuickTime movie of the
moment when she won (it can be played with
xanim
under GNU/Linux).
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