I'm so pleased you could make it.

A retrospective home page.

If I still worked here, the vital information would have been:

Email address:

manchek@CS.UTK.EDU

Snailmail:

Computer Science Department
104 Ayres Hall
University of Tennessee
Knoxville, TN 37996-1301
Office:
217 Ayres Hall
(423)974-5790 or (423)974-8295

But I don't

I am going here.

If I had to guess, I'd say my new email address would be manchek@icemail.iced.com

So,

What did I used to do with my time except wonder what we would have been having for lunch that Friday?

Well, I worked as a research associate in the ICL group at the University of Tennessee . There, I sometimes got to write things like PVM. "What was that?" you may have asked...

Parallel Virtual Machine is a message-passing system composed of a programming library and manager processes. It ties together separate physical machines (which can be of different types), providing communication and control between the subprograms and detection of machine failures. The resulting virtual machine appears as a single, manageable resource. PVM is portable to a wide variety of machine architectures and operating systems, including workstations, supercomputers, PCs and multiprocessors.

If you would have wanted to have known more about PVM, well you could have just had a day...

You could have checked out PVM in its happy home on Netlib. There's source code, documentation and related materials such as tutorials and user group presentations.

The official PVM home page is at Oak Ridge National Lab.

Here is an html version of the PVM Frequently Asked Question list.

XPVM is a graphical PVM console with lots of angry fruit salad. Guaranteed to suck every last cycle out of your machine like a vacuum cleaner with a fresh bag.

There's a nifty PVM Introduction Page at KSU .

And a Demo page at CMU with hypertext man pages and live baby PVM programs you can hold and pet. Actually, I think someone left the lights on all night and they're kinda fried and dessicated now.

There are several PVM-related tech reports from OGI about various topics such as process migration and a VMS port of PVM.

A PVM book is available from MIT Press. Check it out, you can trash around in an html version of the book on netlib or order the real thing from MIT Press.

I worked

Near, but not with other people, At my keyboard all day as I typed, often smiling or something that could have been mistaken for that.

Even before that I

Used to build lots of random hardware but, sadly, I didn't seem to do that anymore. Whatever had happend to the good old days. Anyhow, I got to write lots of code, some of which worked.

Aren't software disclaimers great? My favorite one goes something like this (translated somewhat): "We are not liable for anything bad that happens because you use this thing that we're selling. We don't even claim to know what it's good for, but we can suggest some uses. Also, it's ours and you owe us money for it because some guy with a huge right side who works here thought it up and typed it in. But, if you use it and get sued because it turns out somebody else had the idea first, that's too bad. Be sure to apply for any necessary licenses that might apply where you're currently sitting."

Gosh, I wondered what the temperature in Boulder, CO was?

Or, here?

And I wondered how this was done?

Ooh, I wanted one too.

I lived in hell

The Top Five Reasons I Had Been in Knoxville Too Long

5. I heard it was going to snow and rushed out to buy 4 dozen eggs
4. My pet mold was killed by frost
3. Heard the new 10-plex cinema opened in Farragut, and went by to check it out
2. I was starting to drive like I lived there
1. I watched Roseanne and laughed

The cleanest city I ever saw was Phoenix, Arizona; the dirtiest, Indianapolis, Indiana; the ugliest - with an intense, concentrated, degrading ugliness - Knoxville, Tennessee. - John Gunther.

God, there was a cat sitting on my chest as I watched TV.

I must have gone.

See the inside of the vortex-o-nulls.

manchek@CS.UTK.EDU