Henry Spencer (born 1955) 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 programmer A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/creates ...

and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely used

software library In computer science, a library is a collection of non-volatile resources used by computer programs, often for software development. These may include configuration data, documentation, help data, message templates, pre-written code and subr ...

for

regular expression A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or ...

s, and co-wrote C News, a

Usenet Usenet () is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979, and it was ...

server program. He also wrote ''The Ten Commandments for C Programmers''. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book ''Managing Usenet''. While working at the

University of Toronto The University of Toronto (UToronto or U of T) is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, located on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution ...

he ran the first active Usenet site outside the U.S., starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

to provide an archive of Usenet in the 1980s. The first international Usenet site was run in

Ottawa Ottawa (, ; Canadian French: ) is the capital city of Canada. It is located at the confluence of the Ottawa River and the Rideau River in the southern portion of the province of Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, and forms the core ...

, 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 Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

, 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; this is commemorated in Vernor Vinge's 1992 novel ''

A Fire Upon the Deep ''A Fire Upon the Deep'' is a 1992 science fiction novel by American writer Vernor Vinge. It is a space opera involving superhuman intelligences, aliens, variable physics, space battles, love, betrayal, genocide, and a communication medium res ...

''. 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 modeled on Spencer (and, slightly obliquely, named for him). He is also credited with the claim that "Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly."

Preserving Usenet

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

Deja News Google Groups is a service from Google that provides discussion groups for people sharing common interests. The Groups service also provides a gateway to Usenet newsgroups via a shared user interface. Google Groups became operational in February ...

. 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 The University of Western Ontario (UWO), also known as Western University or Western, is a Public university, public research university in London, Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by resident ...

, where Google's Michael Schmidt tracked them down and, with the help of

David Wiseman David Wiseman (born September 11, 1981 in Pasadena, California) is an American artist and designer whose work is known for its detailed craftsmanship and dialogue with traditional filigree decorative arts. His work spans from bronze filigree patte ...

and others, got them transferred onto disks and into Google's archives.

Free software contributions

Henry Spencer helped

Geoff Collyer Geoff Collyer (born 1958) is a Canadians, Canadian computer scientist. He is the senior author of ''C News'', a protocol-neutral news transport, and the designer of NOV (computers), NOV, the News Overview database (article index) used by all moder ...

write C News in 1987. At around the same time he wrote a non-proprietary replacement for regex(3), the

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 ...

library for handling

regular expressions A regular expression (shortened as regex or regexp; sometimes referred to as rational expression) is a sequence of characters that specifies a search pattern in text. Usually such patterns are used by string-searching algorithms for "find" or ...

, and made it freely available; his API followed that of Eighth Edition

Research Unix The term "Research Unix" refers to early versions of the Unix operating system for DEC PDP-7, PDP-11, VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center (CSRC). History The term ''Research ...

. Spencer's library has been used in many software packages, including

Tcl TCL or Tcl or TCLs may refer to: Business * TCL Technology, a Chinese consumer electronics and appliance company **TCL Electronics, a subsidiary of TCL Technology * Texas Collegiate League, a collegiate baseball league * Trade Centre Limited ...

MySQL MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...

, and

PostgreSQL PostgreSQL (, ), also known as Postgres, is a free and open-source relational database management system (RDBMS) emphasizing extensibility and SQL compliance. It was originally named POSTGRES, referring to its origins as a successor to the In ...

, as well as being adapted for others, including early versions of

Perl Perl is a family of two high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming languages. "Perl" refers to Perl 5, but from 2000 to 2019 it also referred to its redesigned "sister language", Perl 6, before the latter's name was offici ...

. Circa 1993, Spencer donated a second version of his RE library to

4.4BSD The History of the Berkeley Software Distribution begins in the 1970s. 1BSD (PDP-11) The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify a ...

, following the

POSIX The Portable Operating System Interface (POSIX) is a family of standards specified by the IEEE Computer Society for maintaining compatibility between operating systems. POSIX defines both the system- and user-level application programming interf ...

standard for regular expressions. Spencer was technical lead on the

FreeS/WAN FreeS/WAN, for Free Secure Wide-Area Networking, was a free software project, which implemented a reference version of the IPsec network security layer for Linux. The project goal of ubiquitous opportunistic encryption of Internet traffic was n ...

project, implementing an

IPsec In computing, Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) is a secure network protocol suite that authenticates and encrypts packets of data to provide secure encrypted communication between two computers over an Internet Protocol network. It is used in ...

cryptographic Cryptography, or cryptology (from grc, , translit=kryptós "hidden, secret"; and ''graphein'', "to write", or '' -logia'', "study", respectively), is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adve ...

protocol stack The protocol stack or network stack is an implementation of a computer networking protocol suite or protocol family. Some of these terms are used interchangeably but strictly speaking, the ''suite'' is the definition of the communication protoco ...

for

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

. He also wrote 'aaa' (Amazing Awk Assembler), which is one of the longest and most complex programs ever written in the

awk AWK (''awk'') is a domain-specific language designed for text processing and typically used as a data extraction and reporting tool. Like sed and grep, it is a filter, and is a standard feature of most Unix-like operating systems. The AWK lang ...

programming language. He also developed a 4

point Point or points may refer to: Places * Point, Lewis, a peninsula in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland * Point, Texas, a city in Rains County, Texas, United States * Point, the NE tip and a ferry terminal of Lismore, Inner Hebrides, Scotland * Point ...

font used by entomologists in labeling pinned insect specimens.

Space

Spencer is a founding member 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 Most or Möst or ''variation'', may refer to: Places * Most, Kardzhali Province, a village in Bulgaria * Most (city), a city in the Czech Republic ** Most District, a district surrounding the city ** Most Basin, a lowland named after the city ** A ...

, a Canadian science

microsatellite A microsatellite is a tract of repetitive DNA in which certain DNA motifs (ranging in length from one to six or more base pairs) are repeated, typically 5–50 times. Microsatellites occur at thousands of locations within an organism's genome. ...

dedicated to studying variable light from stars and

extrasolar planet An exoplanet or extrasolar planet is a planet outside the Solar System. The first possible evidence of an exoplanet was noted in 1917 but was not recognized as such. The first confirmation of detection occurred in 1992. A different planet, init ...

s launched by

Eurockot Eurockot Launch Services GmbH is a commercial spacecraft launch provider and was founded in 1995. Eurockot uses an expendable launch vehicle called the Rockot to place satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). Eurockot is jointly owned by ArianeGroup ...

in 2003. The

asteroid An asteroid is a minor planet of the inner Solar System. Sizes and shapes of asteroids vary significantly, ranging from 1-meter rocks to a dwarf planet almost 1000 km in diameter; they are rocky, metallic or icy bodies with no atmosphere. ...

117329 Spencer is named in his honour. He is a highly regarded space enthusiast, and is a familiar and respected presence on several space forums on Usenet and the

Internet The Internet (or internet) is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a '' network of networks'' that consists of private, pub ...

. From 1983 to 2007 Spencer posted over 34,000 messages to the sci.space.* newsgroups. His knowledge of space history and technology is such that the "I Corrected Henry Spencer" virtual

T-shirt A T-shirt (also spelled tee shirt), or tee, is a style of fabric shirt named after the T shape of its body and sleeves. Traditionally, it has short sleeves and a round neckline, known as a ''crew neck'', which lacks a collar. T-shirts are general ...

award was created as a reward for anyone who can catch him in an error of fact.

References

External links

Brief biography of Spencer at O'Reilly Media

* Janet Wong, News@UofT, December 5, 2001
Asteroids 101
(6:33)
The Dawn Mission
(4:38)
Early Days
(6:38) �
Moon and Back
three videos of interviews at SpaceAccess 2013 conference, April 2013.
The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (Annotated Edition) by Henry Spencer
* — A paper he wrote with Geoff Collyer about software portability.
aaa - the Amazing Awk Assembler by Henry Spencer

awf - the Amazingly Workable Formatter by Henry Spencer
{{DEFAULTSORT:Spencer, Henry Living people Unix people Usenet people Free software programmers Duke University alumni 1955 births