VanLUG Email Archive
Dave Michelson (dmichelson@ieee.org)
Sun, 12 Sep 1999 02:35:34 -0700
PRESS RELEASE
For Immediate Release Fri, Sep 10, 1999
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LINUX AND UNIX - THE CANADIAN CONNECTION
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In his groundbreaking history, "A Quarter Century of UNIX" (Addison
Wesley, 1994), Peter H. Salus notes that, "it is of importance to
recognize the strong Canadian connection of UNIX." Here are some
examples of the Canadians (and Canadian companies) that have played an
important role in the development of UNIX, and more recently, Linux:
* Brian W. Kernighan, one of the inventors of the C and AWK programming
languages, received his BASc in Engineering Physics from the University
of Toronto in 1964. He currently works in the Computing Science Research
Center at Bell Labs, the R&D arm of Lucent Technologies.
* Alfred Aho, one of the inventors of the AWK programming language,
received his Bachelor's degree from the University of Toronto in 1963.
He is currently a vice-president at Bell Labs, the R&D arm of Lucent
Technologies.
* James Gosling, one of the inventors of the Java programming language,
the NeWS window system, and an early version of the Emacs programmer's
editor (Gosmacs), received in BSc in Computer Science from the
University of Calgary in 1977. He is currently a VP & Fellow at Sun
Microsystems.
* Peter MacDonald of Soft Landing Systems in Victoria assembled the
first complete Linux distribution in 1992. Red Hat, Caldera, Debian,
Slackware, and the other current Linux distributions all trace their
roots back to SLS.
* Bob Young, CEO of Red Hat Software, is originally from Hamilton.
(http://www.redhat.com/)
* George Pajari, Director of Engineering at Faximum Software in West
Vancouver, led the team that developed the fax software that the two
largest UNIX vendors, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard, both ship
with their UNIX workstations. (http://www.faximum.com/)
* Gurusamy Sarathy, lead developer for the upcoming Release 5.6 of the
Perl scripting language, works for ActiveState Tool Corp. in Vancouver.
(http://www.activestate.com/)
* Evan Leibovitch of Starnix Ltd. in Brampton, Ont., is one of the
founders of the Linux Professional Institute, a group which is
developing certification standards for Linux consultants and system
administrators. (http://www.lpi.org/)
* Stormix, a new Linux distribution which is setting new standards for
ease of installation, is being developed here in Vancouver.
(http://www.stormix.com/)
* Corel Corp. of Ottawa, has embraced Linux as an alternative desktop
platform. Corel WordPerfect for Linux has been available for over a
year. Corel is expected to ship other Linux-based office software in
the near future. (http://linux.corel.com/)
* Rebel.com of Ottawa develops and sells an Internet appliance called
the NetWinder which uses Linux as its operating system.
(http://www.rebel.com/)
* The Puffin Group of Ottawa is coordinating the effort to port Linux to
Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC servers. (http://www.thepuffingroup.com/)
* The Linux User Groups in Vancouver, Ottawa, and Toronto are among the
largest in the world. The Vancouver Linux Users Group alone has over
300 members. (http://www.linux.bc.ca/)
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-- -o)
Dave Michelson /\\
dmichelson@ieee.org _\_v
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