Henry Spencer

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (August 2007)

For other uses, see Henry Spencer (disambiguation).

1 Preserving Usenet
2 Free Software contributions
3 Space enthusiast
4 References
5 External links

Henry Spencer is a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote 'regex', a widely-used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also authored The Ten Commandments for C Programmers^[1]. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book Managing Usenet ^[2]. Whilst working at the University of Toronto he ran the first active Usenet site outside the US, starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide an archive of Usenet in the 1980s.

The first international Usenet site was run in Ottawa, in 1981; however, it is generally not remembered, as it served merely as a read-only medium. Later in 1981, Spencer acquired a Usenet feed from Duke University, and brought "utzoo" online; the earliest public archives of Usenet date from May 1981 as a result.

The small size of Usenet in its youthful days, and Spencer's early involvement, made him a well-recognised participant; among other things, this is commemorated in Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel A Fire Upon the Deep. The novel featured an interstellar communications medium remarkably similar to Usenet, down to the author including spurious message headers; one of the characters who appeared solely through postings to this was modelled on Spencer (and, slightly obliquely, named for him).

He is also credited with the insight that "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."^[3]

[edit] Preserving Usenet

In mid-December 2001, Google unveiled its improved Usenet archives, which now go more than a decade deeper into the Net's past than did the millions of posts that the company got when it bought an existing archive called DejaNews.

Between 1981 and 1991, while running the zoology department's computer system at the University of Toronto, Spencer copied more than 2 million Usenet messages onto magnetic tapes. The 141 tapes wound up at the University of Western Ontario, where Google's Michael Schmidt tracked them down and, with the help of others, got them transferred onto disks and into Google's archives.^[4] I posted references that could easily be checked out regarding how Henry Spencer's archive was void of 100's of posts from me, Robert Weigel. David Senkovich, Kenn Barry would both recall the incident where I was cussed at for 7 pages for simply asking what I could hypothetically give Kenn that would serve as 'good, solid historical information for the resurrection'. I've communicated with these people in more recent years and believe they are still reachable. Dave was the administrator. If you doubt that Henry's archives were stripped of all threads from talk.religion.misc that I posted, why don't you just ask them? Or is this a page to preserve Henry in some kind of 'sainthood' status INSTEAD of reporting on accurate history? The truth is, his archives are tainted with selective historical modifications. Perhaps Henry monitors his own page. Perhaps Henry would like to tell me why he fears the truth being told. Perhaps he would like a permanent spot on a host of web pages documenting this incident.

[edit] Free Software contributions

Henry Spencer helped Geoff Collyer write C News in 1987.

At around the same time he wrote a non-proprietary replacement for regex(3), the Unix library for handling regular expressions, and made it freely available. Spencer's library has been used in many software packages, including Tcl, and adapted for others, including early versions of Perl.

Spencer was technical lead on the FreeS/WAN project, implementing an IPsec cryptographic protocol stack for Linux.

He also wrote infamous 'aaa' - the Amazing Awk Assembler which is one of the longest and most complex programs ever written in the awk programming language.

[edit] Space enthusiast

Spencer is one of the founding members of the Canadian Space Society, and has served on its Board of Directors several times since 1984. He did mission analysis (planning of launch and orbits) for the CSS's Canadian Solar Sail project (now defunct), and was Software Architect for MOST, a Canadian science microsatellite dedicated to studying variable light from stars and extrasolar planets launched by Eurockot in the first quarter of 2003. The asteroid 117329 Spencer is named in his honour.

He is a highly regarded space enthusiast and historian, and is a familiar and respected presence on several space forums, including Usenet and the Internet. From 1983 to 2007 Spencer has posted over 34000 message to the sci.space.* newsgroups. His knowledge of space history and technology is such that the "I Corrected Henry Spencer" virtual T-shirt award was created as a reward for anyone who can catch him in an error of fact. Thus far, there are few winners.