Bob Fabry


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In the fall of 1979 Professor Bob Fabry, of the University of California at Berkeley, responded to DARPA's interest in moving towards Unix by writing a proposal suggesting that Berkeley develop an enhanced version of 3BSD for the use of the DARPA community. Fabry took a copy of his proposal to a meeting of DARPA image processing and VLSI contractors, plus representatives from Bolt, Beranek, and Newman, the developers of the ARPAnet. There was some reservation whether Berkeley could produce a working system; however, the release of 3BSD in December 1979 assuaged most of the doubts. With the increasingly good reputation of the 3BSD release to validate his claims, Bob Fabry was able to get an 18-month contract with DARPA beginning in April 1980.

This contract was to add features needed by the DARPA contractors. Under the auspices of this contract, Bob Fabry sets up an organization which was christened the Computer Systems Research Group, or CSRG for short. He immediately hired Laura Tong to handle the project administration. Fabry turned his attention to finding a project leader to manage the software development. Fabry assumed that since Bill Joy had just passed his Ph.D. qualifying examination, he would rather concentrate on completing his degree than take the software development position. But Joy had other plans. One night in early March he phoned Fabry at home to express interest in taking charge of the further development of Unix. Though surprised by the offer, Fabry took little time to agree. The project started promptly.

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