IP: Three Twenty Five Year Anniversaries

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Twenty Five years ago, three events happened that left a mark on my  life. They were:

Phillip Merlin, a graduate of the Technion, received his Ph.D. under my supervision at UC Irvine.. Phil then went to a 
Post Doc at IBM Yorktown and after a brief stay in Canada went back to Israel  as a Lecturer at the Technion. In a 
nearly unprecedentedly  brief  time he was made a Senior Lecturer.He died at a very young age leaving a wife and 
daughter. Each year the Technion holds a Seminar in his honor. This year I will be giving it. Phil's thesis wasa major 
advance in the field of process modeling and introduced Time Petry Nets. 

Jon Postel, received his Ph.D under my co-supervision,.  at UCLA with a thesis that was a seminal work  in Protocol 
verification.  Since most of you know Jon's impact on the internet, I will just say he went on to a great career cut 
short at too young an age.

I miss both of them very much.

In a lighter tone, this is also the 25 anniversary  of the coming online of the DCS computer at the UC Irvine of which 
I was the PI. . The DCS was a system ahead of its time. It was a fully distributed computer system composed of the then 
new mini-computers connected via a new idea in token rings . The software system was one of the first, if not the 
first, to have a micro-kernel with message based IPC. It was fault tolerant and   incrementally   expandable.  Many of 
the ideas developed in the DCS formed the basis of future computer systems and the token ring was the basis of the IBM 
Token Ring which had almost identical architecture.  It was featured in Business Week and unlike many such experiments 
actually  ran and achieved in practice many of its goals. It also generated a list of real great graduate students who 
went on to very successful careers.

Dave