[ih] Dan Lynch has passed away

[Steve Crocker]

Geoff's short note says three strikingly important things.

   1. Geoff was the kind of kid who was fascinated with computers and found
   a way to hang around them.  (I was one of them too some years earlier.)

   2. Dan was the kind of manager who recognized, appreciated and nurtured
   kids like that.

   3. The environment was sufficiently permissive for Dan to be able to do
   that.  Things tightened up considerably a few years later.  But the advent
   of personal computers opened the computer world to nearly everybody.
   However, in the early days, the openness of the university and research
   computing centers made it possible for kids like Geoff to get involved.

Steve


On Sun, Mar 31, 2024 at 2:23 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> 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
> --
> Internet-history mailing list
> Internet-history at elists.isoc.org
> https://elists.isoc.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history
>


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