Friday, February 17, 2006

bsdtalk018 - Interview with Kirk McKusick

Interview with Marshall Kirk McKusick, Computer Scientist and early BSD developer at UC Berkeley.

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the historical show today.

Anonymous said...

Wow! That was really interesting.

Thank you!

Anonymous said...

Great show. Keep up the good work. I'd really like to see a talk by Theo and friends. Cheers!

Anonymous said...

Great interview, very nice insight on the history of BSD, and also the internet in general because TCP/IP was originally implemented on UNIX as Kirk mentions.

I would like to have heard a little bit abotu OpenBSD and how that fits into the history, I do already know, but from an oldschool BSD guys' perspective, and what significant technical differences there are between NetBSD and OpenBSD. I also very much missed the question about BSD on the desktop when it comes to DesktopBSD and PC-BSD. Besides those two things, great interview! :D

Anonymous said...

Hey, nice iview!

But there was alot of Radio-noice/disturbance in the podcast and it was very low so you had to higher the volume which increased the noice very much :/

Anonymous said...

Love the show. It was with great interest that I listened to this one because I didn't know that BSD had been so important in the development of the internet. Keep it up!

Mr said...

Karl,
Sorry about the noise. I know the audio quality really needs to get better. I don't conduct all the interviews from the same computer, given the odd times that I have to record the interviews, so my audio setup changes a lot between interviews. I wish Audacity had a good noise filter. I find that it adds more annoying artifacts than the noise.

Anonymous said...

"I wish Audacity had a good noise filter. I find that it adds more annoying artifacts than the noise."

Run the High Pass Filter with a 'Cutoff frequency' of 600Hz (target freq. * 2) and start each interview with 10 seconds of just background noise, so you can properly use the noise removal tool. You should be encoding the mono PCM wave file at the command line with lame, use something like the example below:

"lame -m m -q 0 -V 0 -B 320 -c bsdtalkfoo.wav bsdtalkfoo.mp3"

You can also get away with using sampling rates much lower then 44.1KHz, because:

"In telephony, the usable voice frequency band ranges from approximately 300 Hz to 3400 Hz. The bandwidth allocated for a single voice-frequency transmission channel is usually 4 kHz, including guard bands, allowing a sample rate of 8 kHz to be used as the basis of the pulse code modulation system used for the digital PSTN."

"The voiced speech of a typical adult male with have a fundamental frequency of from 85 to 155 Hz, and that of a typical adult female from 165 to 255 Hz. Thus, the fundamental frequency of most speech falls below the bottom of the "voice frequency" band as defined above. However, enough of the harmonic series will be present for the missing fundamental to create the impression of hearing the fundamental tone."

Anonymous said...

Just started listening this week. I enjoyed this show because of the historic look. I enjoy the length of the podcast too. I don't know if I will ever switch from Slackware, but I really have enjoyed your podcast, and learning more about BSD's. Thanks for your efforts, they are appreciated. I'm sure the users and developers of BSD appreciate your professional voice for the BSD world.

Anonymous said...

Nice piece of history there!

A must for all interested in the BSDs..

Anonymous said...

This was overall a good interview. The only thing that kind of bothered me about it was the fact that Kirk didn't even mention Bill Jolitz and his 386BSD, from which, all of the present Open source BSD projects originate. He completely skipped over the 386BSD project and jumped from CSRG to FreeBSD and NetBSD. Bill Jolitz should get the main credit for creating the 386-based BSD.

Anonymous said...

great stuff! many thanks!!
:-)