How I Spent My Summer Vacation

Well, not me: Tom Lyon. His post was actually entitled My Summer at Bell Labs and tells the story of his summer internship at the Labs. Regular readers know I’m a sucker for this type of thing so of course I have to share it.

At the end of his junior year at Princeton, he applied for a summer internship at Bell Labs. He’d done some work with moving Unix to the IBM 370 so of course he wanted to work with the Unix group. The problem was that the Unix group was primarily a research organization and weren’t very active with the intern program so Lyon just applied to the normal intern program.

In an incredible stroke of luck, Ken Thompson went to lunch with Lyon and his interviewer and learned of Lyon’s work with porting Unix to the 370. As a result, he was invited to work with Dennis Richie and Steve Johnson who were working on porting Unix to the Interdata 8/32 minicomputer. Lyon’s job was making the user programs portable.

He says that his senior year at Princeton was a disappointment to him because after his experience at the Labs, he couldn’t take his courses seriously. He said they were interfering with his education.

If like me, you enjoy reading stories about the early days of Unix and the people involved in building it, take a look at Lyon’s post. It’s fairly short and a quick read but enjoyable nonetheless.

This entry was posted in General and tagged , . Bookmark the permalink.