From ggr at seer-grog.net Wed Sep 16 23:14:11 2020 From: ggr at seer-grog.net (Greg Rose) Date: Wed, 16 Sep 2020 06:14:11 -0700 Subject: [Auugps] [AUUG-Talk]: Last call: dealing with two boxes of AUUG documents and photos from Christopher Vance In-Reply-To: <1c2b9e9e8e886e0ebdc392ba65e6d75d5c8f0e0d.camel@crawford.emu.id.au> References: <93A36209-3F7F-4305-ABD9-056ED8EFA026@canb.auug.org.au> <8e1f67c6-a644-0983-2d96-0db4d7537972@davidnewall.com> <20200708064304.GB13501@ozlabs.org> <20200710023848.GB9036@auricle.kd> <20200720065539.5ltwu4riehslxz27@raf.org> <735be2141238d2763082c71cda6e0ba8a4c4823b.camel@gmail.com> <1c2b9e9e8e886e0ebdc392ba65e6d75d5c8f0e0d.camel@crawford.emu.id.au> Message-ID: For those of you who were associated with UNSW, I'm sorry to pass on that Ken Robinson died recently. It's a little known fact that it was Ken, not John Lions, who wrote to Bell Labs to get the first Unix license outside North America. (John, at roughly the same time, wrote to Niklaus Wirth, to get Pascal! What a role reversal.) Note from Aaron Quigley, current head of school, below. Greg. Phone/Signal: +1 619 890 8236 GPG/PGP: 1081A37C 232B EC8F 44C6 C853 D68F E107 E6BF CD2F 1081 A37C Hello Greg, My name is Aaron Quigley and I?m the new head of school in CSE. I wanted to let you that sadly the former acting head of school, Ken Robinson passed away on the 5th of September. Ken joined UNSW in Jan of 1965 and by his early years in 1974 the Department of Computer Science (in EET) had a PDP 11/40 for teaching and admin. Recognising the UNIX system as ?too good to be true?, Ken wrote to Dennis Ritchie to acquire a copy which arrived in 1975. This made UNSW the first University outside of the USA to run UNIX as a production facility. Later Ken introduced a teaching innovation, the building of a complier as a major assessable, practical project in his Programming Languages and Compiling Techniques Subject. With David Carrington, Ken implemented the Give system. Ken was the architect of the original BE Software Engineering program in CSE as well as being the program coordinator for many years. Ken was passionate for teaching and software engineering as a branch of engineering. Ken served as acting head of school from 1987 ? 89 and he retired in 2012 but he remained connected with CSE for a number of years after that. The latest information is that the funeral will on Fri 18 Sep in the afternoon, time not specified. For those interested in the live stream, please send an email to kenrfuneral at gmail.com to register. Rosalie has said, "no flowers by request, in lieu of flowers donations to Dementia Australia.? Thanks to Morri for providing the details on his funeral and to Sri and Morri for some of their memories of Ken. If you have any memories of Ken you would like to share place do let us know. Best, Aaron -- Aaron Quigley www: www.cse.unsw.edu.au | m: +61 401 704 922 | t: @UNSWComputing UNSW Computer Science and Engineering -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: image001.jpg Type: image/jpeg Size: 34050 bytes Desc: not available URL: From dave at horsfall.org Thu Sep 17 11:13:24 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2020 11:13:24 +1000 (EST) Subject: [Auugps] [AUUG-Talk]: Last call: dealing with two boxes of AUUG documents and photos from Christopher Vance In-Reply-To: References: <93A36209-3F7F-4305-ABD9-056ED8EFA026@canb.auug.org.au> <8e1f67c6-a644-0983-2d96-0db4d7537972@davidnewall.com> <20200708064304.GB13501@ozlabs.org> <20200710023848.GB9036@auricle.kd> <20200720065539.5ltwu4riehslxz27@raf.org> <735be2141238d2763082c71cda6e0ba8a4c4823b.camel@gmail.com> <1c2b9e9e8e886e0ebdc392ba65e6d75d5c8f0e0d.camel@crawford.emu.id.au> Message-ID: On Wed, 16 Sep 2020, Greg Rose wrote: > For those of you who were associated with UNSW, I'm sorry to pass on > that Ken Robinson died recently. It's a little known fact that it was > Ken, not John Lions, who wrote to Bell Labs to get the first Unix > license outside North America. (John, at roughly the same time, wrote to > Niklaus Wirth, to get Pascal! What a role reversal.) Damn! He was the best lecturer that I ever had, and he taught me much. And yes, I knew that it was Ken who ordered the tape when discussing the CACM article with Ian Hayes (and I have a vague recollection that it was Power Engineering who actually paid for it). One of our assignments was to write a compiler called SYMPL (?), loosely based on ALGOL. Now, semicolons are required, but I wrote the parser in such a way that it recognised the missing symbol (from the state of the parser etc), inserted it, and kept on compiling; I submitted a program with no semicolons whatsoever, it was faithfully corrected, and produced the correct output. I think he also designed FLUB - First Language Under Bootstrap - which as you can guess had to bootstrap itself; I vaguely recall that punched cards were involved to define the character set or something (corrections welcome). Vale, Ken. -- Dave From jgw at icloud.com Thu Sep 17 12:20:24 2020 From: jgw at icloud.com (Jon Wright) Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2020 12:20:24 +1000 Subject: [Auugps] [AUUG-Talk]: Last call: dealing with two boxes of AUUG documents and photos from Christopher Vance In-Reply-To: References: <93A36209-3F7F-4305-ABD9-056ED8EFA026@canb.auug.org.au> <8e1f67c6-a644-0983-2d96-0db4d7537972@davidnewall.com> <20200708064304.GB13501@ozlabs.org> <20200710023848.GB9036@auricle.kd> <20200720065539.5ltwu4riehslxz27@raf.org> <735be2141238d2763082c71cda6e0ba8a4c4823b.camel@gmail.com> <1c2b9e9e8e886e0ebdc392ba65e6d75d5c8f0e0d.camel@crawford.emu.id.au> Message-ID: I also remember GRIFFEN (spelling?) - the program proving language which was the most feared part of 2nd year? > On 17 Sep 2020, at 11:13 am, Dave Horsfall wrote: > > On Wed, 16 Sep 2020, Greg Rose wrote: > >> For those of you who were associated with UNSW, I'm sorry to pass on that Ken Robinson died recently. It's a little known fact that it was Ken, not John Lions, who wrote to Bell Labs to get the first Unix license outside North America. (John, at roughly the same time, wrote to Niklaus Wirth, to get Pascal! What a role reversal.) > > Damn! He was the best lecturer that I ever had, and he taught me much. And yes, I knew that it was Ken who ordered the tape when discussing the CACM article with Ian Hayes (and I have a vague recollection that it was Power Engineering who actually paid for it). > > One of our assignments was to write a compiler called SYMPL (?), loosely based on ALGOL. Now, semicolons are required, but I wrote the parser in such a way that it recognised the missing symbol (from the state of the parser etc), inserted it, and kept on compiling; I submitted a program with no semicolons whatsoever, it was faithfully corrected, and produced the correct output. > > I think he also designed FLUB - First Language Under Bootstrap - which as you can guess had to bootstrap itself; I vaguely recall that punched cards were involved to define the character set or something (corrections welcome). > > Vale, Ken. > > -- Dave > _______________________________________________ > Talk - The AUUG discussion list. > Talk at lists.auug.org.au > https://lists.auug.org.au/listinfo/talk From dave at horsfall.org Thu Sep 17 13:09:29 2020 From: dave at horsfall.org (Dave Horsfall) Date: Thu, 17 Sep 2020 13:09:29 +1000 (EST) Subject: [Auugps] [AUUG-Talk]: Last call: dealing with two boxes of AUUG documents and photos from Christopher Vance In-Reply-To: References: <93A36209-3F7F-4305-ABD9-056ED8EFA026@canb.auug.org.au> <8e1f67c6-a644-0983-2d96-0db4d7537972@davidnewall.com> <20200708064304.GB13501@ozlabs.org> <20200710023848.GB9036@auricle.kd> <20200720065539.5ltwu4riehslxz27@raf.org> <735be2141238d2763082c71cda6e0ba8a4c4823b.camel@gmail.com> <1c2b9e9e8e886e0ebdc392ba65e6d75d5c8f0e0d.camel@crawford.emu.id.au> Message-ID: [ Sorry for the duplicated massages, but it's hard to pick out the list(s) and non-members... ] On Thu, 17 Sep 2020, Jon Wright wrote: > I also remember GRIFFEN (spelling?) - the program proving language which > was the most feared part of 2nd year? Well, the bird of prey is "gryphon", but my CompSci lecherers were always known for their warped sense of humour; it must be the RF from the computers or something. -- Dave, with his tin-foil hat firmly in place