Joe Ossanna (Dec 10, 1928 – Nov 28, 1977)

Joe Ossanna’s stint at Bell Labs started from mid 50’s until he died in 1977. Ossanna was one of the lead developers in Multics, the first timesharing operating system at Bell Labs and MIT. Later on Ossanna, along with Thompson, Ritchie and Rudd Canaday, developed Unics, which today is well-known as Unix.  Ossanna also worked in writing a version of nroff (also called as Troff) that managed team’s new Graphic systems CAT phototypesetter. In 1973, he wrote the first Unix troff in PDP-11 assembly language, then two years later he rewrote the code in C.

Douglas Mcllroy:

Douglas Mcllroy is known for developing Unix pipes or pipelines, apart from developing a number of Unix tools. Mcllroy’s stint at Bell Labs started from 1958 till he retired in 1997. He also stood as the lead force behind both component based and product line software engineering.  Apart from receiving numerous awards from the computer industry, Mcllroy also had written and edited numerous books and journals. Today he works as an adjunct professor of computer science at Dartmouth College.

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