Pete Finnigan's Oracle Security Weblog

I just saw a post on the Oracle-l list about an article on the Unix Review website. It is titled http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=9846/ur0508l/ur0508l.html - (broken link) Dept. 1127: going, Going, GONE! and is written by Unix God Peter H. Salus. The article marks the demise of department 1127 which is where the likes of Ken Thomson (creator of Unix), Dennis Ritchie (Creator of Unix and C), Brian Kernighan (Creator of Awk), Doug McIlroy, Rob Pike and Tom Duff (Famous for his "Duff's Device" in which he implemented loop unrolling using C's switch/case utilising the fact that cases can fall through. This is, quite simply genius C coding and the aforementioned link includes the original 1983 post describing Tom's invention).

Department 1127 was the place of invention of the AT&T dialect of Unix, created by Thompson and Ritchie is 1969 whilst they spent time reviewing their recent experiences of Multics. Unix was written in PDP assembler and later ported to C after Dennis Ritchie created it from B, which was itself created from BCPL (This is a simplistic history!).

It is a sad demise when such a great place of creation has closed. This department was the place of work for many greats in the computer industry.

What has this to do with Oracle Security? - well nothing specifically except a large number of Oracle installations run on systems derived from work these guys did originally a long time ago.