UNIX

A C compiler in LISP, a LISP in C, and the subject that changed my life

In 1986 I took Compiler Techniques under Bruce Ellis and wrote a C compiler in LISP. I have got it running again, on hardware that did not exist when I wrote it.

Rogoweb: Rogue and Rog-O-Matic, alive in the browser

The 1980 game Rogue and the expert system built to play it, both compiled to WebAssembly and running side by side in a browser tab. The original C, not a rewrite.

A celebration of 50 Years of Unix

A beautiful operating system, still healthy after 50 years.

Distributed Client/Server Architectures and Transaction Processing on Open Systems (AUUG'94)

The AUUG'94 conference paper on how client/server systems were actually being built on open systems, from remote presentation to distributed databases, later revised for Oracle OpenWorld.

Performance Tuning for Relational Database Applications

A 1993 AUUG conference paper on finding and fixing bottlenecks in relational database applications on UNIX, with three case studies benchmarking Oracle and Informix across RAID levels and Volume Manager configurations.

UNIX Password Encryption Considered Insecure

Our 1991 USENIX paper showing that DES-based UNIX password encryption could be brute-forced, with an ECL hardware design that encrypted a password in 6 microseconds.

Distributed Computing and Risk Management: the original manuscript

The longer version of our 1990 Optech paper, with the sections SunTech Journal cut, the libraries described one at a time, and the figures as we drew them.

Distributed Computing & Risk Management

Our 1990 SunTech Journal article on hedging the risk in an options book, and the distributed trading system we built at Optech to do it on a network of Sun workstations.

1992 — 1995

AT&T Global Information Solutions (NCR)

Architecture Consultant

Consulted to organisations including St. George Bank, Franklins, Rockmans and Telstra.

1986 — 1987

Bain & Company

Casual Staff

Administered one of Australia's first commercial UNIX systems, and in 1986 connected the firm to ACSnet, making it one of the earliest non-academic organisations in the country online.

lisp-cc

The C compiler I wrote in LISP for Bruce Ellis's Compiler Techniques subject at Sydney, recovered and grown into a full K&R 1978 compiler that emits arm64 instead of VAX. Ships with a reconstruction of the LISP interpreter it was marked against and the 1979 Seventh Edition C library, so the whole thing still bootstraps itself to a byte-identical fixed point.

Rogoweb

The classic 1980 Unix game Rogue and its automated player Rog-O-Matic, running in the browser. Not a reimplementation, but the original C source compiled to WebAssembly.