|
|
|
|
|
Many people contributed enormously to the effort that culminated in this book. First, the Linda group at Yale: particularly (in order of appearance) Jerry Leichter, Rob Bjornson, Venki Krishnaswamy, Mike Factor and Susanne Hupfer; many thanks, too, to Paul Bercovitz, Scott Fertig, Jim Philbin and Stephen Zenith. The second author acknowledges with particular satisfaction the help, contributions and advice of two of the same people he mentioned in his thesis seven years ago: Mauricio Arango and Suresh Jagannathan. Both authors are grateful for the help and support of their colleagues and friends at Bell Labs, particularly Sid Ahuja and Tom London.
We will always be grateful to Dick Lau of the Office of Naval Research for funding support that made our work possible. The National Science Foundation has been a friend and indispensable supporter of our research in good times and bad, and a model of seriousness and integrity in all its dealings. Chris Hatchell, our administrative assistant and group manager-coordinator, set new standards. We are much indebted to him for years of brilliant, indispensable helpfulness. And we thank our international visitors, and the research groups around the world who have kept us informed about their work on and with Linda.
But in the end, our acknowledgments come down to one man. If the discipline of computer science had a man of the decade during the 1980's, our candidate would be Martin Schultz. For many of those years Martin was chairman of the department at Yale; for all them, he was a leader of the field. Martin saw clearly that significant contributions to computer systems research (vs. mere academic wheel-spinning) require hardware and systems research and real applications. When you put those ingredients together (he thought) the reaction might be spectacular; it might illuminate the field. He was right. He had a vision, he put it into effect, and wonderful things happened. Thanks, Martin—
Nicholas Carriero
David Gelernter