Back then, at Bell Labs, a Cherry few know

Cherry: Yes, it is. Very high. And there was this flavor, other people probably talked about this, but it was group dynamics all going on up there. We were all up in the sixth floor. Although I think I worked mostly in my office and visited the sixth floor with questions, [inaudible] the sixth floor. But there was this attitude, there were all these little tools built, and it was the idea of pipes that just kinda, of stringing things together, that was all neat and wonderful. And there was this attitude that he who touched it last owned it. So if you needed PR (?) to do something PR didn’t do, and you went and added it, you now owned PR. And so if some other part of it broke, you owned it.

MSM: You were now PR’s support.

Cherry: You were PR’s support. Yeah, so a lot of the programs floated from person to person because somebody would add a feature to Sort, and they owned Sort. Somebody else would add a feature to Sort and then they owned Sort.

Now that is, how open source was done at Bell Labs in the 70ies. Inside the corp. though, half owned by Western Electric and half by AT&T. Dig the spirit.

... The graphics part of it, I think Tech is still better as far as what EQN does and what Tech does. From a mathematical standpoint I think you’ll find Tech better, but I don’t think Tech stuff is anywhere near as natural to work with. That may be very prejudiced, I don’t have a…

Oral History at Princeton with Lorinda Cherry.