On 5/19/2021 9:40 PM, Bob Smith wrote:
> Larry died peacefully with his family nearby on Sunday, May 16, 2021.
>
> I met Larry in 1971 upon joining STSC where he was Vice President for
> Systems. We hit it off right away as we shared a love for many things
> including word games and puzzles, and of course APL.
>
> Before I joined STSC, Larry had achieved a significant milestone in 1972
> by jointly writing one of the world's first worldwide email systems,
> named Mailbox, or 666 BOX to its users where he was known as LMB.
>
> The annual Dictionary Rally was started by three of my friends to which
> Larry caught on immediately, eventually winning the competition along
> with his first wife Donna, an unheard of twice, undoubtedly because of
> his keen sense of detail and love of words. He started the meme of Lost
> Positives where we used his 13 volume Oxford English Dictionary to look
> up “gruntled” where we found that “dis” is an intensifier, not a negater.
>
> He shared with me many stories of the early days of APL design
> discussions. Once, the group was deciding whether to keep the symbols
> for the “and” and “or” functions since their result was duplicated by
> “min” and “max”. Larry settled the argument by noting that those two
> sets of functions had different identity elements, and so separate
> symbols for those Boolean functions remained, which, later on, pleased
> me greatly.
>
> I remember that when he learned that he shared the 1973 Grace Murray
> Hopper award for his work implementing APL\360, we bundled into my car
> and brought back bottles of cold champagne so we could celebrate
> properly in the middle of the day.
>
> After he went back to IBM, we kept in touch, often exchanging small
> gifts, such as a beautiful nautilus which still sits on my book shelf,
> along with a very early plot of a prime spiral.
>
> At some time, I made it a point to visit Larry and Beverly annually,
> just to keep in touch. In time, his health deteriorated, but I was able
> to convince him to attend the Minnowbrook APL Implementors Workshop in
> 2017. He flew to DC and we drove to the workshop in upstate NY where he
> showed off more prime spiral plots as well as a collection of Dictionary
> Rally dictionaries and instructions over the years. The 450 miles of the
> trip up and back with Larry melted away as we reminisced about the many
> good times we shared.
>
> Due to ill health, he, Jim Brown, and Roger Hui couldn’t make it to the
> 2019 Minnowbrook gathering, so we asked the attendees to say a few words
> of encouragement to each of them which Jon McGrew adeptly videotaped and
> sent off.
>
> Throughout the time I knew Larry, he was my mentor. I looked up to him
> so much that I followed him into becoming an APL implementor and
> language designer, all of which has given me such great pleasure over
> many years. I can fully appreciate how he so much enjoyed those roles.
>
> To say I miss him greatly is an enormous understatement.
>
> Please share your own thoughts of your experiences working
>
I met Larry when I attended an APL planning session in 1972(?) that was
held at what I believe was his parent's cabin high up in the Sierra
Nevada mountains in California... Bob Bernecky and I traveled there
together from IPSA, I recall Jim Brown being there and a number of
others... Larry's wife cooked all the meals with the provisio that
someone else from the group dealt with cleaning the dishes :) We all
took turns washing up.
Best memory: Larry's daughter (Emily??) was about 4 at that time and I
remember her taping Larry on the shoulder [when he was dialed into STSC
with an acoustic coupler modem using a spinwriter AJ terminal I think] -
she asked if she could get on next to check her email (!)
Wonderful family and Larry was a great inspiration. I felt that every
time he spoke it was clear he had forgotten more about computing than I
was likely to every know.
Rest in peace; condolences to his family.
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