It's with a heavy heart I announce Ken Unix passed away
It's been a while since I've written on here. But it's with a heavy heart I take to my keyboard. KenUnix passed away yesterday. He was a beloved friend of mine, a supporter and encourager of what I want to accomplish on this site. In truth its his finding me that is the inspiration for the first product I want to launch.
KenUnix came to me through my CHIP archive. He wanted to know how to flash his CHIP and access it from a windoze 10 install. From there we grew into friends. It amazes me how one can feel loss so strongly for someone you have never actually met. But we talked about a great many things both telephonically and through email. We worked on various software projects and bugs together. He regaled me with tales of his adventures in trying to keep phone calls flowing across this nation.
You see, Ken was a telephone switch technician with an avid hunger for knowledge of things telephone switching, electronics and computer related. He was one of the army of early pioneers growing the phone switching networks to keep calls flowing across this nation. He started at AT&T and later moved on to a few other companies. Some of his tales were quite fantastic, involving gun men or chasing down "phone phreaks".
HaD ran an article on the private US military phone system. I asked him about it and he described the extended keypad and then told me he couldn't talk about it. 
Then he went on to mention that early air-raid siren systems were also phone-call activated. His hands were buried deep in the "reach out and touch someone" network.
We had both started our PC experience on the TRS-80 model 1 when it came out. We both had Linux, TRS-DOS, M$ DOS and windoze experience. But HE had original AT&T UNIX experience dating back to '74. I only became involved with it in '91 with SCO Xenix and then later at the end of the '90s, with FreeBSD and Linux. We were both into programming. He had experience with some of the more obscure languages, like COBOL, FOCAL and FORTRAN. We both had worked with BASIC, BASH and C. So we collaborated on projects like a bug hunt in bwBASIC.
He loved to play with virtual machines using VirtualBox or various emulators. So he contributed a lot of time and effort into the SimH project to package software loads for use with it. I assisted him with some of the more obscure UNIX coding topics like taking input from the user when stdin is coming from a pipe or file. He also spent quite a lot of time trying to help people over mail lists. He had a heart to make it easy for others to experience the historical computing milestones.
Ken also served his country as an Air Force vet.
I will miss Ken Unix.
You can find his collection of odds-and-ends archived here. His personal page is here.
For now: Farewall my friend...
10 FOR x=1 TO 25
20 PRINT
30 NEXT
40 PRINT "Bye Bye kenUnix :~("
50 shell("timidity taps.mid >/dev/null &")
60 SLEEP 3
70 FOR x=1 TO 25
80 SLEEP 1
90 PRINT
100 NEXT
I found "taps.mid" here.
