Lorinda Cherry died recently

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Lorinda Cherry died recently historical person unix minnie.tuhs.org
via jmiven 1 year ago | archive
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jmiven edited 1 year ago | link

Lorinda Cherry, an ex-member of Bell Labs, passed away. She did well-known tools such as dc, bc or eqn. This post from Doug McIlroy on TUHS is a nice technical biography.
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snan 1 year ago | link
```
dc -e "2 3 7 499 1543873789841 2d3 7d181 21617 42743 54909343 503569221839329 34232707540093883 891665010438258643967299***********1-*****P"
```
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  jxy 1 year ago | link
  
  Unfortunately I doubt Lorinda’s dc would work for this. Looking at V7 and V8 source code: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/dc/dc.c https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/dc/dc.c the numbers on the stack are represented by a list of char each less than 100, and P simply print out each char in reverse order.
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    snan edited 1 year ago | link
    
    Yeah. It works with GNU dc, which is fantastic. It’s great how good code can start simple and humble.
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      jxy 1 year ago | link
      
      This works in 9front and plan9port, as the dc(1) there is very similar to V7 and V8.
      
      dc <<. 2 3 6807552317 2328426530307296941 602020729717403186741 1828050163974886373140680461*****P .
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telemachus edited 1 year ago | link
Less technical and detailed (but with some distinct stories and quotations):

https://ncwit.org/profile/lorinda-cherry/

Some other material:
- An interview between Michael S. Mahoney and Lorinda Cherry: https://gist.github.com/telemachus/c01e3a213574a7bdcf79a480231396a2
- Some mentions and quotes in this oral history of Unix: https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/unixhist/finalhis.htm
I’d be curious to see her appearance on the Today Show that McIlroy mentions. She and Nina Macdonald were on in May of 1981 to talk about Writer’s Workbench, but so far I can’t find any video.
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  jxy 1 year ago | link
  
  V10 has WWB: https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V10/cmd/wwb
  
  I guess UNIX’s license pretty much doomed its existence? What exactly is its license? Anybody knows?
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    hobbified edited 1 year ago | link
    
    Originally, none at all. As I understand it, V9 and V10 never escaped Bell Labs until 2017, so they were private IP..
    
    Post-2017, there’s a public statement that “Alcatel-Lucent will not assert its copyright rights with respect to any non-commercial use” of Research Unix, which somewhat resembles a license, but in any case wouldn’t allow derivatives to be released under any OSD-compatible license.