Joe Ossanna

Joseph "Joe" F. Ossanna ( born December 10, 1928 in Seattle, Washington; † 28 November 1977, in Monterey, California ) was an American computer scientist.

Life

Ossana completed his electrical engineering degree at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan in 1952 with a Bachelor.

Subsequently, he worked at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill (New Jersey). First, he participated in various theoretical basic research projects. Later, he was part of the development team for the operating system Multics. This project gave Bell Labs in 1969.

However, the team, the next Joseph Ossana Ken Thompson and Douglas McIlroy belonged to did not want to give up, and developed the Unix operating system. In order to justify the cost of the required PDP -11, Joseph Ossana developed in 1973 the typesetting system Troff, first in assembly language. In 1975, he ported it to C. Joseph Ossana worked until his death in it. In 1979, the project was taken over by Brian Kernighan, who built it modular so that a variety could be supported by setting machines.

He died at the age of 48 years to a massive heart attack in a hospital in Monterey, where he had been admitted because of a previous heart attack ease.