[ih] Dan Lynch has passed away

[the keyboard of geoff goodfellow]

Dan was the kind hearted soul who gave this teenage hacker his (first
ARPANET) account of GEOFF at SRI-AI and then a building pass to come and go at
all hours.

This was in the early 70's when Tenex 1.31 pretty much "ruled" the net and
Dan was a true master at the operating systems internals, most specifically
the scheduler, memory management and file system where he
relentlessly tinkered, refined and enhanced them (this was the time of CORE
memories and bryant swapping drums. :)

In these days the timesharing systems were not so reliable with almost
daily crashes and even weekly/monthly entire file system wipe outs not
uncommon (especially with SRI-AI's TV-A-TO-D hw interface that would
occasionally "spray" the file system with a camera image)... when the Tenex
system would reboot it would run a program called CHECKDISK that would
verify the integrity of the file system before letting users log on... this
was a most time consuming task that went sequentially though the file
system, but Dan sped this process up by having CHECKDISK create a fork (nee
a "process") for each disk drive to run in parallel greatly speeding the
process up.

a memorable Dan Lynch annicdote:

Dan had a TI Silent 700 ASR thermal printer Data Terminal (300 baud) in his
SRI office and was an ardent TECO user... IIRC there was one 1 or 2
"display"/"crt" terminals connected to the SRI-AI KA-10 but they were
"dumb" and were essentially just glass tty's.  Douglas Engelbart's
neighboring SRI-ARC group was in the process of evaluating various CRT
terminals to replace their home grown XCORE display system that was used
for DNLS.  yours truly couldn't "believe" that no one at SRI-AI was using
any type of display editing (in contrast to yours truly's first text
editing experience was with Pentti Kanerva's TVEDIT over at Pat Suppes
IMSSS at Stanford).  SRI-AI's staff were connected to the mainframe with
Teletypes (at 110 baud) or these TI 300 baud thermal printing terminals...
So one day yours truly borrowed one of the "smart" CRT terminals Douglas
Engelbart's group was considering (a Datamedia) and wheeled it into the
K2079 machine room (that everyone would traverse thru to get to the line
printer) and showed off TVEDIT... including Dan, whose response was "people
around here don't like things like that"... BUT everyone else who saw it
resoundly said "how can we get that?" to which yours truly said: go talk to
Dan....  and so it was that by the end of the week a half dozen or so
Datamedia terminals were on order... and as they say: the rest is/was
history :D

geoff


On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 9:41 AM vinton cerf via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> The founder of INTEROP and former IAB member (1990?-1994) passed away 30
> March 2024.
>
> http://lynch.com/Dan_Lynch/Welcome.html
>
> He built a fire under the Internet, helping to propel its commercialization
> and spread beyond the US. He played an integral role in its development as
> the computer center director at SRI International and later USC-ISI before
> founding INTEROP.
>
> I will miss him but will be forever grateful for his enthusiastic embrace
> of the Internet and its applications.
>
> vint
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>
>

-- 
Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
living as The Truth is True