Talk:Mark Crispin

assorted facts
MRC (online, he was often referred to by his username, which was his initials) married Lynn Gold around 1981, they broke up sometime in the mid to late 80s. He worked for the University of Washington on imap infrastructre for a long time, getting laid off in 2008. This is from my memory (we had some social circles in common, though I never met him in person), but posts at https://plus.google.com/+LaurenWeinstein/posts/4YvWfnneTyN corroborate. When it was announced he was ill, messages to be read at his hospice bedside were posted to the imap5 mailing list, including from Paul Vixie, Dave Crocker, Cyrus Daboo, and others. https://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/imap5/current/msg00571.html One of those messages indicates that he was a sysadmin at Stanford around the mid-1980s. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.104.34.180 (talk) 12:12, 13 December 2013 (UTC)

Hi, folks. This is Lynn Gold. I can verify that we married on May 29, 1981. I left him in July, 1987 (our legal separation date was July 10), and our divorce was finalized in December of 1988 (I'm not sure of the exact date the decree actually took effect) because I was "there". I could add a lot more to this bio and to a few others, but my information comes firsthand. I obviously know a lot of stuff that could easily fit into the Personal Life section, but how do I attribute myself as the source? Figmo (talk) 21:02, 11 November 2015 (UTC) figmo

36-bit address vs. 32-bit address - vs. 24-bit address?
In this edit you changed "He developed the first production [[PDP-10] 32-bit address ARPANET Network Control Program (NCP) for the WAITS operating system ... Prior to that time most systems only supported the original 8-bit addresses." to "He developed the first production PDP-10 36-bit address ARPANET Network Control Program (NCP) for the WAITS operating system ... Prior to that time most systems only supported the original 8-bit addresses." with the comment "PDP-10's were 36 bit machines, not 32 ...".

I think the "addresses" being referred to there were host addresses on the ARPANET, not machine addresses (which were only 18-bit on PDP-10s, until the introduction of extended addressing).

And Crispin is quoted in A Guide to the World of Computer Wizards as having said

""While working at Stanford, I wrote the first 96-bit leader PDP-10 Network Control Program as my first monitor coding project. That took about two weeks, and at the time nobody believed I had accomplished it because someone on the East Coast had been working on it for over a year and still hadn't finished. I understand I rocked some boats when it was proven I had succeeded."

In addition, unless I'm missing something, at least in the January 1976 revision of BBN Report 1822, while the old-style 32-bit leader in Figure A-1 on page A-2 has 2 bits of destination host and 6 bits of destination IMP, giving the 8-bit header referred to in the full statement, the new-style 96-bit leader in Figure 3-1 on page 3-12 has 8 bits of destination host and 16 bits of destination IMP, with an 8-bit reserved field marked as "destination network", so, unless I'm missing something, the new addresses were only 32-bit if the reserved field is included - but that version of the report says of that field "For future use, these bits must always be zero".

So, unless, by the time Crispin wrote his NCP, those fields were used, it looks as if addresses were only 24-bit.

So I changed it to "He developed the first production PDP-10 96-bit leader ARPANET Network Control Program (NCP) for the WAITS operating system ... Prior to that time most systems only supported the original 32-bit leader."

You were there, I wasn't, so if there's anything I've gotten wrong, or if there's a better way of writing it, go ahead and change it. Guy Harris (talk) 07:00, 5 August 2022 (UTC)


 * No, no, you've got it exactly right. I read the "PDP-10 32-bit address", and the "32-bit" bound more tightly to the preceding "PDP-10" in my mind than to the following 'address NCP'. (I misinterpreted what was written because I was in a hurry; I had a long list of pages to fix). Thanks for catching that. Noel (talk) 13:32, 6 August 2022 (UTC)