Geoff Collyer (born 1958) is a

Canadian Canadians (french: Canadiens) are people identified with the country of Canada. This connection may be residential, legal, historical or cultural. For most Canadians, many (or all) of these connections exist and are collectively the source of ...

computer scientist A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...

. He is the senior author of ''

C News C News is a news server package, written by Geoff Collyer, assisted by Henry Spencer, at the University of Toronto as a replacement for B News. It was presented at the Winter 1987 USENIX conference in Washington, D.C. Functionally, the operati ...

'', a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV, the News Overview

database In computing, a database is an organized collection of data stored and accessed electronically. Small databases can be stored on a file system, while large databases are hosted on computer clusters or cloud storage. The design of databases sp ...

(article index) used by all modern newsreaders. He contributed the code that allowed to convert the

Bourne Shell The Bourne shell (sh) is a Shell (computing), shell Command-line interface#Command-line interpreter, command-line interpreter for computer operating systems. The Bourne shell was the default Unix shell, shell for Version 7 Unix. Unix-like syste ...

from using the non-portable

sbrk and are basic memory management system calls used in Unix and Unix-like operating systems to control the amount of memory allocated to the data segment of the process (computing), process. These functions are typically called from a higher-lev ...

to a portable

malloc C dynamic memory allocation refers to performing manual memory management for dynamic memory allocation in the C programming language via a group of functions in the C standard library, namely , , , and . The C++ programming language includes ...

based implementation.http://schilytools.sourceforge.net/bosh.html Bourne Shell project page In the past he worked as a

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

system programmer, but since 1994 he has been living on ''Plan 9'' while working at

Bell Laboratories Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

Honors

Asteroid

129101 Geoffcollyer 1 (one, unit, unity) is a number representing a single or the only entity. 1 is also a numerical digit and represents a single unit of counting or measurement. For example, a line segment of ''unit length'' is a line segment of length 1. I ...

, discovered by astronomers at the

Jarnac Observatory This is a list of observatory codes (IAU codes or MPC codes) published by the Minor Planet Center. For a detailed description, ''see observations of small Solar System bodies Observations of minor planets as well as comets and natural satellit ...

in Arizona in 2004, was named in his honor. The official was published by the

Minor Planet Center The Minor Planet Center (MPC) is the official body for observing and reporting on minor planets under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU). Founded in 1947, it operates at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. Function ...

on 9 August 2006 ().

References

External links

Geoff Collyers Homepage with publications

modified V7 shell source

modified V9 shell source

recent Plan 9 kernel source
* Geoff Collyer and Henry Spencer (1987).
News Need Not Be Slow
'. * Mark Linimon (1994).
C News Frequently Asked Questions
'.
C News source code
* 1958 births Living people Usenet people Plan 9 people {{compu-bio-stub