[talk] Thurs, Nov 19th: Stephen R Bourne

[George Rosamond]

November 19th, 18:45 PM
Special Meeting, Stephen R. Bourne
Notice: special meeting, not regular date

This will be a packed meeting, so plan to arrive early if possible.

Abstract

    my history and background
    how and why we had to re write the shell
    why I wrote my own memory management
    key language design decisions
    where those ideas came from
    what was hard to get right
    system changes we made to accommodate sh
    what the rules were in UNIX group
    what would I do differently today

Speaker Bio

Steve Bourne is computer scientist who is internationally known for his
work on the UNIX operating system. While at Bell Laboratories, Steve
designed the UNIX Command Language known as the "Bourne Shell". It is
the standard command line interface to UNIX and is widely used today in
scripting in the UNIX programming environment.

Steve has a Bachelor's degree in mathematics from King's College London,
England. He has a Diploma (or Master's degree) in Computer Science and a
Ph.D. in mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge. While at the
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory he worked on an ALGOL 68
compiler and CAMAL an early algebra system.

After Cambridge, Steve spent nine years at Bell Labs with the Seventh
Edition Unix team. As well as the Bourne shell, he wrote the adb
debugger and published /The UNIX System/, the second book on the UNIX
system, intended for a general readership. This book is recognized as a
text for the effective use of UNIX.

After Bell Labs, he spent 20 years in senior engineering management
positions. At Cisco Systems, he was director of engineering for
enterprise network management; at Sun Microsystems, he managed the
Solaris 2.0 program; at Digital Equipment Corporation, he developed
DEC's first RISC-based workstation; and at Silicon Graphics, he was
Director of Software Engineering responsible for the introduction of the
IRIS, the company's first graphics workstation.

>From 2000 to 2002 he was President of the Association for Computing
Machinery. For his work on computing he was made a Fellow of the ACM in
2005. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.

At present Steve is chief technology officer at Rally Venture Partners,
a Menlo Park-based venture capital group in California. He is also the
chair of the Editorial Advisory Board for /ACM Queue/, a magazine he
started when he was President of the ACM.