Bob Fabry

Robert S. Fabry
Born	(1940-12-02) December 2, 1940 (age 83)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Scientific career
Fields	Computer science
Institutions	University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	List-structured Addressing  (1971)
Doctoral advisor	Victor Yngve
Doctoral students	Eric Schmidt
Other notable students	Eric Allman Bill Joy Kirk McKusick

Professor Bob Fabry founded the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) in the EECS Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 1979. The BSD software developed at CSRG helped spawn the Open Source movement and facilitated the explosion of the internet. The success of the BSD programming environment led to a number of Unix-like systems which replaced the portions of the BSD code that were subject to AT&T copyright.  The Linux system is perhaps the most well-known of these and about half of the utilities that it comes packaged with are drawn from the BSD distribution. ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

As a graduate student at MIT in 1963  Bob Fabry was responsible for two commands on MIT's CompatibleTime-Sharing System (CTSS):  MADBUG and COMIT. Bob wrote MADBUG, a high level debugger for programs written in the University of Michigan's MAD programming language. MAD was the algebraic programming language of choice on CTSS. Previously MAD programs could only be debugged at the assembly language level.  COMIT was a character manipulation language designed by Bob's research advisor Victor Yngve that was eventually overshadowed by SNOBOL. ^[4]

Berkeley Computer Science

When Bob Fabry arrived at Berkeley as a Professor in Fall 1971, there were no interactive computer facilities for students. Programming classes were taught using decks of punch cards and batch processing on a mainframe computer.  The Unix operating system for DEC's PDP-11 computers was introduced at the Symposium on OperatingSystems Principles in November 1973.  Unix provided a low cost path to providing interactive computing to students at Berkeley, and Bob Fabry led the effort to use it in classes. The first instructional Unix system at Berkeley was a PDP-11/45 placed in operation in January 1974.  

Ken Thompson, who created Unix at Bell Labs and had graduated from Berkeley, became a visiting professor in the fall of 1975.  He schooled the students and the staff at Berkeley in the code he had written.  As a result, a number of improvements were added to the version of Unix used at Berkeley. Early in 1977 student Bill Joy put together the first "Berkeley Software Distribution." This first distribution included a Pascal compiler and the VI editor and began to give Berkeley a good reputation for providing Unix enhancements. ^{[1] [3]}

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)

In the fall of 1979, Bob Fabry responded to DARPA's interest in moving towards Unix by writing a proposal suggesting that Berkeley develop an enhanced version of 3BSD for the use of the DARPA community. He founded the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at Berkeley for this purpose.  He was quickly joined by Bill Joy and other students working on projects to improve Unix. ^{[1] [3]}

Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG)

CSRG was founded on the idea that it would share its software as widely as possible for others to use and build on.  The tricky part was that CSRG was initially distributing software that was partly licensed from AT&T and partly new software produced at CSRG.  Fortunately, the AT&T license was almost free for educational institutions as a result of an earlier Breakup of the Bell System which required Unix to be licensed at nominal cost to educational institutions.  Also, a single Unix license allowed Unix to be used on all of an organization's computers.  The result was that BSD versions of Unix spread very quickly to educational institutions. An entire generation of computer scientists cut their teeth on Berkeley Unix. BSD 4.3 has been called "the single greatest piece of software ever written".  ^{[1] [3] [5]}

In June 1983, Bob Fabry turned over administration of CSRG to Professors Domenico Ferrari and Susan L. Graham and began a sabbatical free from the frantic pace of the previous four years.  The Wikipedia article on CSRG documents the achievements of the talented individuals who carried the CSRG torch after he left.  CSRG was disbanded in June 1995 after the release of 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2. ^[3]

Award Winning Paper

A Fast File System for UNIX was selected for the ACM SIGOPS 2015 Hall of Fame Award. ^{[6] [7]}

See also

• Unix File System

External links

• Bob Fabry, PhD, N6EK - Heard Island Expedition 1997

References

1. Leonard, Andrew : BSD Unix: Power to the people, from the code. (May 16, 2000) Retrieved August 2, 2024.
2. University of California: 150 Years of Light: (2023) Retrieved August 2, 2024.
3. McKusick, Kirk:  Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix  Retrieved August 2, 2024.
4. Crisman, P.A., ed. (December 31, 1969). "The Compatible Time-Sharing System, A Programmer's Guide"The M.I.T Computation Center. Retrieved March 10, 2022. (This is a 587 page PDF.  For COMIT see pages 296 to 302; for MADBUG see pages 459 to 472.  Retrieved August 2, 2024.
5. Babcock, Charles:  What's the greatest software ever written? (August 11, 2006) Retrieved August 2, 2024.
6. Marshall Kirk McKusick; William N. Joy; Samuel J. Leffler; Robert S. Fabry (August 1984). "A Fast File System for UNIX" (PDF). ACM Transactions on Computer Systems. 2 (3): 181–197. Retrieved August 2, 2024.
7. SIGOPS Hall of Fame Award  Retrieved August 2, 2024