Talk:Robert Morris (cryptographer)

Moving from Robert Tappan Morris Sr.

The current article probably misstates Dr. Morris's name. See this primary source by Dennis Ritchie, who knows Morris personally. The article refers to the same cryptographer as Bob (Robert H.) Morris.

http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/crypt.html

This article should probably be renamed to "Robert H. Morris" or "Robert H. Morris (cryptographer)". The identification of this Morris as "Robert Tappan Morris" is probably an incorrect inference from the name of his son (Robert Tappan Morris or Robert Morris, Jr.).

This article should also be updated to reflect some of the material from the Dennie Ritchie article.

Also, there is no recent information cited indicating whether Morris still works at NSA/NCSC or not. He did clearly work there during the time periods described in Stoll's book and Ritchie's article.

... the Ritchie article seems to indicate that Morris has retired from the government.

I second that we should move the page. I do not know the correct middle initial, but Tappan is definitely wrong -- NedMike.

I think it's "H.", but probably "Robert Morris" is adequate for the time being. See a Google search that provides evidence that Robert Morris Sr. is Robert H. Morris Sr. -- Schoen 30 June 2005 03:11 (UTC)

Since Robert Morris is a useful disambiguation page, how about making this page be Robert H. Morris and the page for rtm be Robert Tappan Morris, eliminating the existing disambiguation page at Robert Tappan Morris? Then the existing rtm article should become a redirect to Robert Tappan Morris, and the Robert Morris page can include accurate references to both corrected pages. -- Schoen 30 June 2005 03:18 (UTC)

I know the correct middle initial as 'h' as Bob's login was "rhm". He authored quite a few Unix tools. Crypto was merely one of Bob's interests. It was not his primary area of work at Bell Labs. That work was not generally discussed or discussable (ASW). 209.129.244.250 (talk) 22:32, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

OK, this particular move has now been accomplished, and the disambiguation page has been fixed, too. --Schoen 20:12, 10 July 2005 (UTC)

Morris's login was indeed rhm, but the H was a fiction he adopted to placate requests for his middle initial. He did not use it on documents he wrote, including those cited in this article. I will move the initial to a less prominent role. (Info from personal acquaintance.) Mdmi (talk) 22:28, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

The number puzzle

The person who added the solution suggested, if I remember correctly, that the solution should be provided or else the puzzle should not be mentioned. My preferences would be:

(1) My original version (which gives a link to the solution after a spoiler warning template),

(2) Give the solution after a spoiler warning template,

(3) Do not mention the puzzle at all, or at least do not pose it to the reader as a puzzle, and

(4) The current version, which gives the puzzle and the answer with no spoiler warning.

Does anyone have comments on this? --Schoen 07:37, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

I'm not totally sure that the puzzle needs to be mentioned at all, to be honest. But if the puzzle is mentioned, then it would be good to avoid giving away the solution. A spoiler template could work, although it's a little heavy for such a minor item -- perhaps a footnote would work better? — Matt Crypto 09:05, 4 August 2005 (UTC)

Source for "3 rules of computer security" quote?

I've tried to track down where the "The three golden rules to ensure computer security are: do not own a computer; do not power it on; and do not use it." quote came from, without success. The given citation is just one of numerous re-publishings of the quote, not an actual original source. If anybody has further leads, please post. JesseW, the juggling janitor 03:50, 8 August 2013 (UTC)

Your ref is to a 2003 book. I cannot find anything earliest than 26 April 2000 on a Debian newsgroup, by Cesar Mendoza, attributed to Robert _T._ Morris. I will go systematically through my usual plethora of techniques, newspapers.com, newspaperarchive, Factiva, perhaps lexis advance, oldestsearch, discmaster, google books, google scholar, google groups, even bing, but I don't think it'll turn up anything. So I suspect, unfortunately, this is an apocryphal quote and I think it deserves a "dubious - discuss" tag at least. Cancerward (talk) 02:10, 13 July 2023 (UTC)

Replaced with a close, sourceable quote from Grampp and Morris, 1984. Cancerward (talk) 03:54, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Co-author of "dc" and "be"

According to

• https://wiki.tuhs.org/doku.php?id=people:robert_morris
• Libes, Don; Ressler, Sandy; Ressler, Sanford (1989). Life With UNIX: A Guide For Everyone. Prentice Hall. p. 74. ISBN 978-0-13-536657-8.

Avindratalk 16:51, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Bell Labs

Delete the incorrect attribution of m6 to Morris and McIlroy. M6 was the work of Andrew D. Hall, as atttested by his technical memorandum "The M6 Macro Processor", https://plan9.io/cm/cs/cstr/2.pdf Mdmi (talk) 22:49, 13 March 2025 (UTC)

Macros in assembly language had been a mainstay at Bell Labs. While the very first sentence of Hall's technical report acknowledges Morris and McIlroy, McIlroy's "design" was really a taxonomy of choices one must make in building a general macro processor, although he had not actually built one. I do not know how closely Hall followed Morris's choices, but I do know that Bell Labs did not have Mad, so Morris's program saw no use in the Labs, and probably not much at MIT where it lived. Hall's important innovation was to asssure portability across essentially all Fortran implementations. This was no mean feat in a programming language that had to be tricked into reading text. M6 was heavily used as a tool for porting the Altran language for algerbraic manipulation. Mdmi (talk) 02:16, 14 March 2025 (UTC)