| Larry Wall | Larry Wall is one of the associates of O'Reilly & Associates; in his copious free time :-) he has authored some of the most popular free programs available for UNIX, including the rn news reader, the ubiquitous patch program, and the Perl programming language. He's also known for metaconfig, a program that writes Configure scripts, and for the warp space-war game, the first version of which was written in BASIC/PLUS at Seattle Pacific University. By training Larry is actually a linguist, having wandered about both U.C. Berkeley and U.C.L.A. as a grad student. (Oddly enough, while at Berkeley, he had nothing to do with the UNIX development going on there.)
Over the course of years, he has spent time at Unisys, JPL, NetLabs, and Seagate, playing with everything from discrete event simulators to network-management systems, with the occasional spacecraft thrown in. (He also plays with his four kids every now and then, but they win too often.) It was at Unisys, while trying to glue together a bicoastal configuration management system over a 1200 baud encrypted link using a hacked-over version of Netnews, that Perl was born. |
