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Lynne Jolitz - Early Years
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On the formative history of Lynne Jolitz. Part of the Jolitz Heritage Site for the Jolitz Family of Silicon Valley.
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California Girl
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Lynne Greer Jolitz , formerly Lynne Greer Messner, was born in Fremont, California.
Lynne received a Bloss Scholarship for outstanding achievement
to attend Berkeley upon graduation from Merced High School.
Lynne remembers one of her fond memories of high school - appearing in the local high
school musical:
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A student of natural history and anthropology, Lynne made a shift into "hard science"
and following high school went to the University of California at Berkeley in the Physics department.
Surrounded by Nobel prize winners, Lynne Jolitz graduated from Berkeley and applied her skills
in business and technology pursuits, eventually finding a home in understanding how
technology and people fit together.
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Lynne Jolitz Rises Through the Business
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At Symmetric Computer Systems, Lynne started by writing the manual on the 375 computer while
she was still a student at Berkeley,
and even hand assembled over 50 of the initial systems, troubleshooting defective
boards, IC's and software. Her skills at communication and organization led to
a series of rapid fire promotions from administrator to general manager to finally
marketing executive, where she handled a national ad campaign in Byte, Dr. Dobbs, Unix Review,
DEC Professional
and Unix World.
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Lynne Jolitz Sifts Technology
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An early BSD user of Version 6 Unix and 2.8BSD on PDP-11's, she found early systems a
mixture of good and bad. "Good" needed explaining, but "bad" needed replacement.
Unless you got "bad" out really fast, it took on a life of its own, with many
attempting to find a way to justify it as "good". Sometimes the "bad" would thus
end up as terminating the "good". Eventually, with 386BSD
she got a chance to explain this and attempt to winnow the "bad" from the "good".
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Lynne Jolitz Focus on Technology
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Lynne quickly discovered the interdependence between business, technology and people.
Few people could understand the "why" behind how to apply technology so that business
could apply it in a way that people could most effectively use. Altering career path,
she has focused exclusively for the last decade on the most critical technologies that
can be brought to market (
InterProphet, ExecProducer)with the greatest impact on the world today.
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The Fun with 386BSD
Lynne Jolitz speaks - "386BSD Mania were the two crazy years (1992-1994) after
the first complete releases hit the Internet. Dr. Dobbs Journal
paved the way for this frenzy by publishing the monthly "Porting Unix
to the 386" series starting in January 1991, and it established a serious
following.
When 386BSD Release 0.0 went out the door, only
a thousand or so downloads was expected. Boy, were we wrong.
The original download site got overloaded and mirror sites were set up all
over the globe. Downloads were reported from every continent except Antartica.
Hunger for 386BSD fed by the Dr. Dobbs Journal article series led to an estimated
250,000 downloads from the Internet in the first week.
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Writing the Owner's Manual for the Symmetric 375 Computer system
Lynne speaks - "The Symmetric 375 was a very
unique computer. Based on the NS32000 microprocessor,
it was a portable no wait state computer with virtual memory, hardware floating point, large processor
main memory, and ethernet. Unlike PCs, it supported 4 users easily with a host of compilers,
debuggers, tools and utilities, and applications. It ran a custom version of
Berkeley Unix (4.1BSD, 4.2BSD, 4.3BSD) called Symmetrix. Later versions offered a configurable kernel
software package for device drivers and SCSI support. Much of this work influenced work later done
in 386BSD. I wrote the "The Symmetric 375 and Symmetrix Owner's Manual" for it.
One of the most interesting aspects of this manual was that it did not follow the typical
"Unix Man command" style. Instead of offering a printed command manual with some hardware pages as was the
common approach, the 375 came with an online man function (early UNIX boxes often didn't do this to preserve disk space).
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