From:  Kerry Liles <kerry.liles@gmail.com>
Date:  21 May 2021 00:44:47 Hong Kong Time
Newsgroup:  news.alt119.net/comp.lang.apl
Subject:  

Re: Lawrence Moser Breed 1940-2021, A Personal Recollection

NNTP-Posting-Host:  null

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.