Evi Nemeth (an Ada Lovelace day tribute)
[Posted March 24, 2010 by corbet]
Sometime around 1981, when your editor was an undergraduate at the
University of Colorado, he was introduced to the Computer Science
department's prized VAX 11/780, which, at that time, was a dual boot
system, switching between VMS and and early BSD Unix every afternoon. The
chief of the Unix side was Evi Nemeth. The first thing that struck most
people about Evi was a general sense of distraction and disorganization;
it's only later that one realized the she was one of those smart people who
make things happen.
Evi armed your editor with a dog-eared edition of the K&R C book
and access to the Unix source. She encouraged the writing of a fix to the
system's memory
management code, which tended to let one memory hog take over the system -
a bad feature on a multiuser computer. That "fix" has, happily, vanished
from living
memory, and any backups which exist will no longer be readable. But the
pure fun of being able to dig into the operating system code lasts to this
day.
These days, Evi lists her office as being "my sailboat, Wonderland,
somewhere in the Caribbean." She has a relatively low profile in the Linux
community, despite being one of the authors of (and the inspiration behind)
the Linux Administration Handbook, but the USENIX crowd knows her
well. Her time at CU launched a whole generation of hackers who are in the
field for the joy of it, and every one of them thinks back fondly to one of
the people who got them started. Well done, Evi; you helped make all this
happen.
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