My old friend and usenet denizen Laura Creighton was the one who wrote the device driver and verified the story. (Not that your should trust anything ESR writes in his polluted version of the Jargon file, but Laura says it's true, and she's trustworthy.)
"At this writing, the Jargon File claims the incident actually happened, at Toronto in 1979 or 1980, and that the sysadmin on duty was actually interviewed. The account doesn't provide enough details to track down an independent account, however.
Current University of Toronto sysadmins have expressed skepticism. For one thing, in almost all versions of the story, including the ostensibly documented one in the Jargon File, the computer is a VAX; at the time a VAX would have been a very unusual platform for this kind of data acquisition (they used PDP-11s). The Toronto zoology department has never been licensed to work with primates; the only section of the university that could have done experiments of this nature was the School of Medicine. Investigation continues."
ableal on May 7, 2010 | root | parent | next [–]
Actually, the original story does say it was Medicine buying the Vax and doing the experiment, with Zoo helping. The VAX 11-780 was the hot machine of 1979/80 ("a 1 MIPS beast!", I heard).
I've seen Laura Creighton's name on Python lists - I believe she's on LinkedIn. The author's "Statistically Invalid Sampling of My Life" (http://edp.org/index.htm) is also pretty amusing - don't think he'd need to embellish that incident.
Laura's done a lot of work on PyPy, which I described in this email (c. 2007):
>Laura and three other members of the PyPy team are doing a benevolent world domination tour, and visiting the bay area soon.
I think you would enjoy meeting each other and talking about PyPy!
>Laura does all kinds of other interesting stuff, with python in particular and computers and reality in general, like writing a device driver to interface monkeys to a VAX. (Google "always mount a scratch monkey"!)
>Laura Creighton has 20 years experience in software training, and Human Factors Engineering. She is a founder of AB Strakt, and a founder and Treasurer of The Python Business Forum, an international non-profit trade association for businesses which develop in Python.
>Yes, that is me. I actually think that Medicine had an 11/something-or-other dual space machine that was running Berkeley 2.98 bsd, not an 11/780 vax, but otherwise, seems correct enough to me.
DonHopkins|26 days ago
My old friend and usenet denizen Laura Creighton was the one who wrote the device driver and verified the story. (Not that your should trust anything ESR writes in his polluted version of the Jargon file, but Laura says it's true, and she's trustworthy.)
https://edp.org/monkey.htm
Always mount the scratch monkey (1987) (edp.org) 34 points by pook on May 7, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 6
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1327146
baha_man on May 7, 2010 | parent | next [–]
http://tafkac.org/faq2k/animal_618.html
"At this writing, the Jargon File claims the incident actually happened, at Toronto in 1979 or 1980, and that the sysadmin on duty was actually interviewed. The account doesn't provide enough details to track down an independent account, however.
Current University of Toronto sysadmins have expressed skepticism. For one thing, in almost all versions of the story, including the ostensibly documented one in the Jargon File, the computer is a VAX; at the time a VAX would have been a very unusual platform for this kind of data acquisition (they used PDP-11s). The Toronto zoology department has never been licensed to work with primates; the only section of the university that could have done experiments of this nature was the School of Medicine. Investigation continues."
ableal on May 7, 2010 | root | parent | next [–]
Actually, the original story does say it was Medicine buying the Vax and doing the experiment, with Zoo helping. The VAX 11-780 was the hot machine of 1979/80 ("a 1 MIPS beast!", I heard). I've seen Laura Creighton's name on Python lists - I believe she's on LinkedIn. The author's "Statistically Invalid Sampling of My Life" (http://edp.org/index.htm) is also pretty amusing - don't think he'd need to embellish that incident.
P.S. The story is, for instance, alluded to here: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2002-May/756589... [broken link not on archive dot org], without either rebuttal or elaboration.
----
Laura's done a lot of work on PyPy, which I described in this email (c. 2007):
>Laura and three other members of the PyPy team are doing a benevolent world domination tour, and visiting the bay area soon. I think you would enjoy meeting each other and talking about PyPy!
>Laura does all kinds of other interesting stuff, with python in particular and computers and reality in general, like writing a device driver to interface monkeys to a VAX. (Google "always mount a scratch monkey"!)
https://www.python.org/about/success/strakt/
>Laura Creighton has 20 years experience in software training, and Human Factors Engineering. She is a founder of AB Strakt, and a founder and Treasurer of The Python Business Forum, an international non-profit trade association for businesses which develop in Python.
https://www.mhonarc.org/archive/html/nmh-workers/2017-10/msg...
>Yes, that is me. I actually think that Medicine had an 11/something-or-other dual space machine that was running Berkeley 2.98 bsd, not an 11/780 vax, but otherwise, seems correct enough to me.