To be the bearer of bad news:
George Coulouris passed away recently.
There's a mention of him in memoriam here:
https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2024/11/newsletter-november-2024/I never knew him personally.
Indeed, the way I even learned about his passing was rather round about.
You see, recently someone shared some history about em (aka
editor for mortals) as being a predecessor to en and ex (which is more widely known as vi now).
George Coulouris was the author of em, the first visual editor for UNIX (albeit somewhat derived, in turn from ed).
More about its backstory here:
https://www.coulouris.net/cs_history/em_story/Finding this bit of history fascinating, as some of you may have noticed the other day, I decided to put in some effort and I submitted a Pull Request to add em to MacPorts in turn referencing Pierre Gaston's spruced up source (
http://pgas.freeshell.org/C/em/) for more contemporary UNIX systems as my basis in the Portfile.
Herby Gillot merged Pull Request.
All was well, or so it seemed, Port Health checks haven't run on all older macOS and OS X versions yet, but it's looking pretty good so far:
https://ports.macports.org/port/em/.Anyway, I emailed George and Pierre to let them know about the MacPort existence of em after it had been merged and to thank them for their sources and also to clarify if I had been correct about listing it as BSD licensed (going off Warren Toomey's efforts from 2002 which basically stipulate that the Caldera Ancient UNIX License sources were made available under a BSD license).
Pierre wrote back with the sad news about George's recent passing.
It's almost paradoxical that I would encounter em and make it more widely available on contemporary UNIX systems whilst I seem to remain mortal and its author has shed his mortal coil.
RIP George Coulouris.
Thank you for your contributions to improving the state of the art of technology for your era.
#GeorgeCoulouris #em #EditorForMortals #ed #en #ex #vi #RIP #MacPorts #PierreGaston #OpenSource #UNIX #History #Memorial
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Live long & prosperous 
h/t 
(6/16)
Kristian Nairn
