by Jeff Berliner, Dick Estrada, Carol Sabia, BBN Colleagues
In 1994 BBN embarked on a project called the Logistics Anchor Desk (LAD). We had a tiny bit of funding from DARPA and a hunting license. We found several organizations in the Army who were interested in the project but had no direct funding line. We had collected snapshots of real Army logistics materiel databases and had put together some PowerPoint slides illustrating some user interface concepts, focused on answering the fundamental question, “Where’s my stuff?” Within a week of joining the project Ray had taken this starting point and built the first working prototype of our Graphical Logistics Anchor Desk, or GLAD as Ray called it, using a combination of C++ and Tcl/Tk. Ray built GLAD with an intuitive user-driven query builder, an efficient multi- database querying and aggregation mechanism, and an OpenMap-based geographic display showing where all the stuff was located: Around the World or within an Area of Operation. We took the system (including a little Sun workstation) to Washington and showed it to our moneyless clients. They were very impressed with how easy it was to ask for and quickly see the location and quantity of any of their stuff: fuel, munitions, equipment, spare parts, food, etc. We returned to Cambridge and within two weeks Ray had dramatically improved the system. He had made numerous enhancements based on the clients’ suggestions and on his own insights of users’ workflow. At the same time, Ray continually refactored his code for efficiency and clarity. We returned to Washington, computer and software in hand and demonstrated it to the clients. In fact this happened several more times. Within a period of a couple months the system was so good that soldiers were able to use it in a major Army exercise in multiple locations. The Log Anchor Desk, with the GLAD component, was deployed to Europe in the winter of 1995-96 and was used to help manage the logistics support of Operation Joint Endeavor: The deployment of US and allied peacekeeping forces to Bosnia. The funding for these activities and follow-on work supported the project for a number of years. What I remember most about the LAD project and Ray is when the Army project manager would introduce the BBN team to senior military personnel. The PM would always tell people that Ray was the person who had sent the first networked email and had chosen the @-sign; that impressed everyone in the government. An interesting sidelight was the while the BBN people and some of the clients were tremendously impressed with Ray’s work we could see that two Government people who had no experience with software development didn’t seem that impressed. We later realized that they thought that making major chances and enhancements in the software was like upgrading PowerPoint slides that described the enhancements. These guys didn’t last very long as clients. We were all very grateful for Ray’s innovative and insightful work, as well as for the sheer pleasure of hanging out with him while we worked together. 3/23/2016 Memories of Rayby Laura Derby, Friend and Neighbor
We knew that Ray was a programmer and a very successful one, but my memories are of other things, although our kids had endless happy hours playing wumpus on Ray's computer. A lot of my memories involve family gatherings. We used to get together every Christmas day, and Ray would produce an amazing meal. Roast beef, or Roast goose, with all the trimmings. We ate beyond repletion and enjoyed every bit. We’d have dinner parties together and play various word games that Ray started us on. We used to compete to see who could come up with the best Tom Swifty. We played another game using clues to come up with something starting with “para” such as "two medical people” would be Paradox. I remember too that Ray could circle breathe which enabled him to do what I think was Tibetan chants without having to stop for a breath. Ray also had a vegetable garden behind their house and i remember sharing in their first (maybe only) ears of corn. We went camping together and Ray brought his sourdough starter to make us all pancakes. Quite yummy sitting outside in Crawford Notch state park. It's so hard to summarize a person and a number of years of friendship, but basically Ray was a quiet man with an enormous range of interests and a really great dry sense of humor. He will be missed. 3/23/2016 Ironic and Encouragingby Harry Forsdick, BBN Colleague
In this day of boasting, bluster, and self promotion, I find it ironic and encouraging to note that my close friend Ray Tomlinson, the most quiet, modest, respectful person I am close friends with is also the person who is most widely known in the world. 3/22/2016 Ray Tomlinson, Sheep Farmerby Fern and Phil Schaffer, Family (In Laws of Ray’s daughter, Suzanne)
The last time we saw Ray, he was working on the farm owned by Karen and him in Lincoln. Like the Pied Piper, he calmly walked among the sheep as they followed him, prancing, leaping and “mehing,” eager for the hay he was carrying to feed them. That day he was “Farmer Ray”, standing there in his tall rubber boots and wide brimmed straw hat. He was quietly enthusiastic and knowledgeable as he discussed farm issues like the electrified fencing system, and the importance of keeping the rams and ewes separated from the younger lambs. Phil and I were there to buy a lamb for slaughter, and Phil was determined to personally choose the lamb we would later consume. I generally avoided looking those cute Ouessant sheep in the eye, but when Phil said he wanted a lamb that was “fit, trim and muscular”, a vision of stringy, tough lamb stew swam before my eyes, and I knew I had to appeal to Ray for help. Casting an expert eye, he quickly picked a lamb, felt its belly and rib cage through its considerable fur coat, examining it with the practiced hand of a country vet, and pronounced it tender and meaty. Satisfied, we drove away that day, remarking that Ray seemed really happy with his life, and would fit into those tall rubber boots just fine. 3/22/2016 Ray's Intuitionby Ian Emmons, BBN Colleague
I had the pleasure of working with Ray Tomlinson on only one occasion. I was maintaining a sizable application that had developed one of those horrible bugs where the bug's occurrence leaves a piece of memory corrupted, but causes no immediate outward sign of a problem. Then some time later (often days or weeks), the corrupted memory would cause the process to crash. I worked on fixing this, on and off, for a couple months. While I was able to identify the nature of the corruption, I was not able to find the original cause of the bug. My manager suggested one day that I fly up to Cambridge (I'm in BBN's Virginia office) and try to see if Ray could help. Ray had never encountered the technology domain of my application before, so I gave Ray a tutorial and went over the code structure. At the end of just an hour and a half he sent me away to think. About 25 minutes later, he had found the problem. It was the most subtle, tricky bug I have ever seen in the course of my 20 years in the software industry. 3/22/2016 Building on Ray's MIT Workby John Makhoul, BBN Colleague
For his Master's thesis, Ray built a computer-controlled speech synthesizer. In those days, speech synthesis was performed by exciting a filter bank with either a sequence of pulses for voiced sounds or with white noise for unvoiced sounds. The filter bank shapes the spectrum and produces the various sounds. So, the heart of the synthesizer was the filter bank. This was an analog filter bank in which the frequency of each filter was computer-controlled. Before I did my PhD thesis, around 1967, I was given a job to use Ray's design to build a speech synthesizer that used operational amplifiers (which had just come out) instead of an analog filter bank. So, this was a completely digital implementation of Ray's synthesizer (I did not actually build a filter bank, but rather a single digital filter that was computer controlled.) The big advantage of the new design was size. Ray's filter bank occupied a whole rack of equipment, while the synthesizer I built fit in a single slot on a rack. Ray always joked with me about how, in a relatively short time, technology can outdate what you did just a short while ago. The silver lining of this story is that, because of my work on the synthesizer, I was very familiar with Ray's filter bank. So, when I was doing my PhD thesis in speech recognition, I wanted to do close to real-time recognition of single words, but there was no way I could do that digitally; it would have taken way too long. Plus I was limited by memory: the single-user computer we had was a DEC PDP-9 that had only 64kB of storage only! So, my solution for doing spectral analysis of the speech was to use Ray's filter bank! Because it was analog, the spectral analysis was immediate! So, without Ray's filter bank, I could not have done that particular speech recognition thesis. For that, I was very grateful to Ray. 3/19/2016 Hunt the Wumpusby Becky Derby, Friend and Neighbor
I was friends with Brooke in elementary school and I have fond memories of playing “Hunt the Wumpus”. I remember how neat it was that we would type directions on the “typewriter” in his office in Lexington and it would type back responses seemingly on its own. I always had an image of a long telephone cord being buried in the ground directly connecting 3 Brent Road to his work office. The game was fun for its own sake, but even more so for being something I never saw anywhere else. This was probably in the mid-70s. Never mind the mind-blowing experience of seeing a computer “screen” replace the paper spooling system later on. He definitely opened my eyes to a different world. 3/19/2016 Creeper and Reaperby Bob Thomas, BBN Colleague
Among the things I admired most about Ray were his playfulness, his willingness to take on a challenge, and the speed with which he could solve complex problems. The recollection below describes a fun interaction Ray and I had more than forty years ago. In the early 70's when the ARPA network was young I worked with Ray at BBN. During that period I began experimenting with techniques for enabling a program running on one host computer in the network to move itself to another host computer in the network in a way that enabled it to continue working on its application on the new host computer without loss of the program state, data, etc. needed to perform the application. At that time there were about seven or eight PDP-10 host computers running an operating system called TENEX in the ARPA network. In those days Ray was, among other things, one of the TENEX developers and maintainers. To do the experimentation I wrote a small program whose job was to maintain a simple database which it updated periodically. It was also programmed to move itself and its database from its current TENEX host computer to another randomly chosen TENEX host computer in the network. The program itself was named Creeper since it crept around the network doing its simple task. Just before Creeper left one host computer to move on to another it output the message "I'm the Creeper; Catch me if you can" on the operator's console of its current host computer. Although I often ate lunch with Ray at work and occasionally car pooled with him I hadn't mentioned anything about Creeper to him. A day or so after the Creeper program started on is journey around the ARPA network Ray started getting calls from the various TENEX sites asking what this Creeper thing was and what they should do to get rid of it. That got Ray's attention. It took Ray remarkably little time to analyze the situation. Within a day he wrote and launched a program which he named Reaper to seek out and destroy Creeper. To do this Reaper used the ARPA network to periodically visit each TENEX host in the network and look for Creeper. Wherever Reaper found an instance of Creeper Reaper would kill it. 3/17/2016 To be of useThis is a poem that was read this morning by Carla Fortmann at Ray's burial in Lincoln Cemetery, Lincoln MA To be of use
3/17/2016 Biggest Regret About Emailby Harry Forsdick, BBN Colleague
Ten years ago, I asked Ray if there was anything he wished he had done with the original email protocols. He thought for a short while and said that his biggest regret is that he didn't put some method to securely authenticate the identity of the sender in the protocols, which in turn lead to us all being deluged with spam. Of course once the evolving email protocols started to be used widely, it was too late to change them. Ray was really upset that this invention that he was associated with had devolved so much that a large percentage of the email traffic was now spam. Of course, in the intervening years, email filters have improved dramatically so that we don't see as much spam. But, it is still there, lurking beneath the surface, using up network bandwidth. But probably nowhere near the waste of bandwidth as all of the cat videos being streamed over the Internet these days. In 2002 there was almost an agreement (https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3207.txt) reached by the major purveyors of email systems to introduce this kind feature into the protocols, but one of the software companies pulled out of the agreement at the last minute. With that failure to agree, the chances of this ever being fixed is miniscule. |
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