“Steve, you were one of the developers of UNIX System V
Release 4. Can you tell us more about your background and
contributions and how you became the co-author of the second
edition of one of the most popular UNIX books?“After getting a BE and MS from Stevens Institute of Technology,
I got a job working in the UNIX System V Development Laboratory at
AT&T Bell Labs. I had wanted to work at Bell Labs, where my
father worked, since I was 12 years old. Ironically, a year after
joining Bell Labs, AT&T reorganized us into a different
business unit, so we weren’t Bell Labs anymore. I started out
working on System V Release 2.0, helping to maintain and benchmark
the VAX port. Eventually, I worked on networking software, which
led me to STREAMS. After most of the original STREAMS developers
completed the port of Dennis Ritchie’s streams to System V Release
3, I ended up taking over responsibility for it somewhere between
SVR3.1 and SVR3.2. During SVR4 development, I enhanced the STREAMS
mechanism, converted the open file table to use
dynamically-allocated memory (thus removing the historic NOFILE
limit to a UNIX process’s open files), moved the poll(2) system
call under the vnode framework, and did a lot of general clean-up
work in the kernel…”
Related Story:
Salon:
Guru of the Unix gurus(Sep 01, 2000)