Rebecca Thomas

Technical writer and programmer

We fell in love with this woman in 1985. She's quite older than we are. Her book "A User Guide to the UNIX OS" was our first Unix Book in 1985 or 6. It was 3 years old and in a sale box even then. Before that buy we had read about Unix only in IBM sponsored magazines in the UB Wien. Unix got a somewhat ambivalent coverage there. In the 80ies she wrote her books mostly with one Jean L. Yates.

Here's a list with publishing year:

• A User Guide to the UNIX System, 82
• The Business Guide to the XENIX System, 84
• User Guide to the UNIX Systems (incl. BSD and System V), 84
• Advanced Programmer's Guide to UNIX System V, 85
• UNIX Administration Guide for System V, 88

Pics seem to be hard to get by but 1 will follow, when we scan the inside of her book. We're getting off of the stars. We would like to build a "Monument du progammeur inconnu". We think, she's still beautiful.

Her professional mission statement on networkcomputing.com's Unixworld goes like

• Unix Advocacy: Although Unix never ``made it'' on the desktop, IMHO, it's still the best darn operating system for getting things done. Of course, it's the OS of technical choice for most servers and database engines, in spite of the Microsoft NT juggernaut.
• Online Editing: I've been with UnixWorld magazine since it's inception almost 20 years ago. I'm still trying to keep the spirit alive.
• Web Programming: I've done all the programming for the UnixWorld Online site and most of the programming for the LAN Times site, our sister publication. I've started with server-side programming (CGI in Perl) and have ventured into writing Java applets and JavaScript for dynamic HTML pages.