I remember my freshman year of college in 1994 when I took C++ and asked the professor about how to …

> The text before the interview mentions AFS which I did not think Ousterhout had anything to do with. I thought it was from Carnegie Mellon and then IBM Transarc. Ya - I wonder if the article writer actually meant LFS (log-structured file system)[0] which was part of the Sprite operating system project. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_file_system

I use tcl in EDA reguarly also. It's quirky, but useful. I'd not choose it for anything non EDA today, but it works well in that niche. The most horrific thing I discovered about tcl is that curly braces within comments can affect flow control. This is because comments are interpreted as a command that does nothing, not the same as complete ignored. Finding that out the hard way was not fun.

Yeah the AFS thing is a mistake. Ousterhout graduated from CMU (PhD) in 1980; the Andrew project (from which AFS sprung) began in 1982 or so. Ousterhout did work on Sprite (a distributed OS and file system) in the 1990s at Berkeley, and then, as another mentions, the log-structured FS (LFS).

> We only had an 8MB quota for our entire Unix account in college. This brings backs some memories for me. In high school we only had a 10MB quota. I remember bringing in stacks of floppies to workaround the quota so I could download junk off their T1 and using file splitting programs. One of my friends even blew all his McJob money on an external Zip drive. By the time I started college USB thumb drives came into vogue and made everything so much easier.

Brings back memories for me. Started college in ‘95, system had a 10MB quota on AFS and I also made use of the ACLs for projects with others. Systems ranged from Solaris to IRIX to AIX. My first GUI app was in Perl/Tk since I already knew Perl for scripts; it was a mail watcher utility that showed recent messages in a window.

Tk is what made people use Tcl, because it was a rare scripting language for GUI on Unix workstations. The Tcl language is actually really clever and interesting, but the textual evaluation model (a much smarter approach than Bourne and C-shell) still made it poor for representing and manipulating graphs. I was lead for the extension language in a new CASE system, which had rich semantic graphs, including cycles. Tcl ended up being chosen by a cofounder, so I wrote up a doc on language limitations and how to work around them. (I'd also argued in the early/mid-'90s that the high-level extension language should also be the application implementation language. Such that we'd develop much of the application functionality ourselves in this high-level language, atop a C++ or C core API for foundation that needed that. Python eventually went this route, but hadn't yet. At the time, people in th…