I hope it works out. We need more tenured people with Macs/Unix!
> PS: Which Bell Labs did you work at? My dad worked forever at
> Whippany,
> though we lived in Berkeley Heights 'cuz he was promised (when he
> took the
> job in 1969) that he'd be transferred to Murray Hill very soon...
I worked at both Holmdel and Murray Hill, as well as the Crawford Hill location in Holmdel (erstwhile home to the astronomers, including my one time boss Bob Wilson -- no I was not an astronomer! -- who won the Nobel Prize for discovering background radiation that gave credence to the Big Bang theory -- up on the hill is the horn antenna that they used. Of slightly lesser significance, on the hill is also a microwave tower that has a line of sight to a parallel unit at the MH location, over which we once ran the world's fastest -- OC48 -- network link).
Today I was driving past the now abandoned Holmdel monolith (http://www.archpaper.com/uploads/saarinen2.jpg ) and on a whim I drove in and parked at the front. The revolving doors were in fact open and I went in. The place was silent and eerie as ever, and though recent reports have painted a picture of untamed plants and vines taking over the insides, the place was not much different than before. Ultimately I found a guard watering the plants (on the inside). The poor man is tasked with spending the day and/or night all alone in this panopticon because the township won't let Alcatel-Lucent just lock up the building.
I worked in Area 11 Research, across 112, 113 and 114. Brian Kernighan once had to work with some of the optics folks in Holmdel and decided to help them with some automation or some such, and chose Tcl as the language to implement his stuff in (I guess despite being the K in Awk he understood its limitations ;-)). He sent me email asking for Tcl installation details and for some pointers and I answered some additional questions he had based on the little Tcl I knew. I had already got my K&R bible (The C Programming Language) signed by the authors, but as a joke I asked Kernighan to sign my Tcl/Tk (Ousterhout) book, which I think he did quite gladly.
Apologies for the nostalgia (I am doing a lot of apologising!),
--ravi
-- Support something better than yourself ;-) PeTA => http://peta.org/ Greenpeace => http://greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to read: http://platosbeard.org/
