Rich Rosen
Encyclopedia
Rich Rosen is a software developer
and an author on the subject of web development
, who gained notoriety as an early high-volume contributor to Usenet
newsgroups.
, New York
. He attended Cornell University
and later Queens College
, where he received a bachelor's degree in computer science
. He later received his master's degree in the same subject from Stevens Institute of Technology
in Hoboken
, New Jersey
, while working at Bell Labs
and later at Bellcore.
) during the 1980s, Rosen was a lead engineer on the team that beta-tested IBM
's then brand-new DB2
relational database management system
, which would become one of the first commercially available relational database systems on the market. He also developed one of the earliest online bulletin board systems used to keep telephone operating companies informed about Bell System
software standards.
He also acquired a reputation there as a high-volume poster to Usenet
newsgroups. The volume of Usenet postings he produced led to rumors that many people were actually using his account, or that he was an AI
program produced by Bell Labs to increase the amount of Usenet traffic and thus augment AT&T
's long distance telephone revenues. Weekly statistics collected during his heyday often showed that he, by himself, was responsible for more than 2% of the entire volume of Usenet postings. The phrase "We are all Rich Rosen" was coined during this period and persisted as a Usenet catchphrase for a number of years.
Rosen posted in a number of newsgroups on a variety of topics, most particularly music and religion. Among his contributions:
He was known for participating in (some would say "inciting") numerous flame wars with other Usenet contributors, including the notorious Brahms Gang, a pair of equally loquacious mathematics
graduate students from Berkeley
who posted from a server named
files, including:
user community in New York through the mid-1990s. He hosted his own popular "Monty Python
home page" that was cited by both Lycos and the Global Network Navigator.
During the latter part of the 1990s, Rosen worked at Pencom Web Works with Leon Shklar
, with whom he would later collaborate on Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols, and Practices, a widely-used textbook for senior and graduate level college courses in Web application development
.
with his wife, Celia. He is "retired" from posting to Usenet, but now has his own blog to post to. He still writes on the subject of web application development, including articles for various online and print journals, while also working with Leon Shklar on a second edition of their Web Application Architecture book. In addition, he recently contributed material to the fourth edition of Mac OS X for Unix Geeks which was published in the fall of 2008. He continues to record his own music, some of which is accessible on his web site.
Software developer
A software developer is a person concerned with facets of the software development process. Their work includes researching, designing, developing, and testing software. A software developer may take part in design, computer programming, or software project management...
and an author on the subject of web development
Web development
Web development is a broad term for the work involved in developing a web site for the Internet or an intranet . This can include web design, web content development, client liaison, client-side/server-side scripting, web server and network security configuration, and e-commerce development...
, who gained notoriety as an early high-volume contributor to Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
newsgroups.
Early life and education
Rosen grew up in Forest Hills, QueensForest Hills, Queens
Forest Hills is a neighborhood in the borough of Queens in New York City, New York, United States.-Neighborhood:The neighborhood is home to upper-middle class residents, of whom the wealthier residents often live in the neighborhood's Forest Hills Gardens area...
, New York
New York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. He attended Cornell University
Cornell University
Cornell University is an Ivy League university located in Ithaca, New York, United States. It is a private land-grant university, receiving annual funding from the State of New York for certain educational missions...
and later Queens College
Queens College, City University of New York
Queens College, located in Flushing, Queens, New York City, is one of the senior colleges of the City University of New York. It is also the fifth oldest of the City University's twenty-three institutions of higher learning. The college's seventy seven acre campus is located in the heart of the...
, where he received a bachelor's degree in computer science
Computer science
Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...
. He later received his master's degree in the same subject from Stevens Institute of Technology
Stevens Institute of Technology
Stevens Institute of Technology is a technological university located on a campus in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA – founded in 1870 with an 1868 bequest from Edwin A. Stevens. It is known for its engineering, science, and technological management curricula.The institute has produced leading...
in Hoboken
Hoboken, New Jersey
Hoboken is a city in Hudson County, New Jersey, United States. As of the 2010 United States Census, the city's population was 50,005. The city is part of the New York metropolitan area and contains Hoboken Terminal, a major transportation hub for the region...
, New Jersey
New Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
, while working at Bell Labs
Bell Labs
Bell Laboratories is the research and development subsidiary of the French-owned Alcatel-Lucent and previously of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company , half-owned through its Western Electric manufacturing subsidiary.Bell Laboratories operates its...
and later at Bellcore.
1980s - Bell Labs and Usenet
While at Bell Labs and Bellcore (now known as Telcordia TechnologiesTelcordia Technologies
Telcordia Technologies, formerly Bell Communications Research, Inc. or Bellcore, is a telecommunications research and development company based in the United States created as part of the 1982 Modification of Final Judgment that broke up American Telephone & Telegraph...
) during the 1980s, Rosen was a lead engineer on the team that beta-tested IBM
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation or IBM is an American multinational technology and consulting corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York, United States. IBM manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and it offers infrastructure, hosting and consulting services in areas...
's then brand-new DB2
IBM DB2
The IBM DB2 Enterprise Server Edition is a relational model database server developed by IBM. It primarily runs on Unix , Linux, IBM i , z/OS and Windows servers. DB2 also powers the different IBM InfoSphere Warehouse editions...
relational database management system
Relational database management system
A relational database management system is a database management system that is based on the relational model as introduced by E. F. Codd. Most popular databases currently in use are based on the relational database model....
, which would become one of the first commercially available relational database systems on the market. He also developed one of the earliest online bulletin board systems used to keep telephone operating companies informed about Bell System
Bell System
The Bell System was the American Bell Telephone Company and then, subsequently, AT&T led system which provided telephone services to much of the United States and Canada from 1877 to 1984, at various times as a monopoly. In 1984, the company was broken up into separate companies, by a U.S...
software standards.
He also acquired a reputation there as a high-volume poster to Usenet
Usenet
Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...
newsgroups. The volume of Usenet postings he produced led to rumors that many people were actually using his account, or that he was an AI
Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...
program produced by Bell Labs to increase the amount of Usenet traffic and thus augment AT&T
AT&T
AT&T Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications corporation headquartered in Whitacre Tower, Dallas, Texas, United States. It is the largest provider of mobile telephony and fixed telephony in the United States, and is also a provider of broadband and subscription television services...
's long distance telephone revenues. Weekly statistics collected during his heyday often showed that he, by himself, was responsible for more than 2% of the entire volume of Usenet postings. The phrase "We are all Rich Rosen" was coined during this period and persisted as a Usenet catchphrase for a number of years.
Rosen posted in a number of newsgroups on a variety of topics, most particularly music and religion. Among his contributions:
- Rich Rosen's Rules of Netnews Debating, a satirical post intended not so much as a set of guidelines to follow when posting, but rather as a statement (like Godwin's LawGodwin's LawGodwin's law is a humorous observation made by Mike Godwin in 1990 that has become an Internet adage...
) about the irrational and often obnoxious behavior often observed in Usenet discussions (which Rosen himself admittedly engaged in). - The Book of Ubizmo and the religion of Ubizmatism, a parody of the extremes associated with mainstream organized religions.
- The story of Toejam Jawallaby, a fictitious musician who was the winner of several bogus "greatest guitaristGuitaristA guitarist is a musician who plays the guitar. Guitarists may play a variety of instruments such as classical guitars, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, and bass guitars. Some guitarists accompany themselves on the guitar while singing.- Versatility :The guitarist controls an extremely...
of all time" polls, whose exploits were later expanded upon in the newsgroupNewsgroupA usenet newsgroup is a repository usually within the Usenet system, for messages posted from many users in different locations. The term may be confusing to some, because it is usually a discussion group. Newsgroups are technically distinct from, but functionally similar to, discussion forums on...
rec.music.jazzJazzJazz is a musical style that originated at the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States. It was born out of a mix of African and European music traditions. From its early development until the present, jazz has incorporated music from 19th and 20th...
. - Several musical compositions that appeared on the first Usenet compilation tape, a little net.music (1985), including A Fair Exchange and Vegetableland (which was ostensibly performed by the aforementioned Toejam Jawallaby).
- Several Usenet April Fool's jokes, including the (now doubly ironic) "Microsoft Windows for the Macintosh" and the "Olfactory Transfer Protocol" (WebOdor).
He was known for participating in (some would say "inciting") numerous flame wars with other Usenet contributors, including the notorious Brahms Gang, a pair of equally loquacious mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
graduate students from Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
who posted from a server named
brahms.berkeley.edu. His verbal battles with the Brahms Gang in particular were sometimes referred to as "The War of the Rosens". He was also known for his variety of frequently-changing .signatureSignature block
A signature block is a block of text automatically appended at the bottom of an e-mail message, Usenet article, or forum post. This has the effect of "signing off" the message and in a reply message of indicating that no more response follows...
files, including:
- Anything's possible, but only a few things actually happen.
- Life is complex. It has real and imaginary parts.
- Look for significance where there's none intended, and you'll surely find it.
- Now I've lost my train of thought, I'll have to catch the bus of thought.
- echo "This is not a pipe." | cat - >/dev/tty
Usenet Citations and Acknowledgements
The volume and content of Rosen's postings evoked strong reactions in both advocates and detractors. People either praised him for his postings or denounced him as a threat to the future of Usenet.- His voluminous output and frequently abrasive postings led many to seek his removal from the net. He was never actually banned, censored or otherwise prevented from posting, but his e-mail addressE-mail addressAn email address identifies an email box to which email messages are delivered. An example format of an email address is lewis@example.net which is read as lewis at example dot net...
was used on the man page for the netnews "expire" command as an example of how this command could be used to delete all postings from a particular user. The use of his address in this manner was viewed by some as an endorsement of censorshipCensorshipthumb|[[Book burning]] following the [[1973 Chilean coup d'état|1973 coup]] that installed the [[Military government of Chile |Pinochet regime]] in Chile...
and it was eventually removed.
- His notoriety also led Howard RheingoldHoward Rheingold-See also:* Collective intelligence* Information society* The WELL* Virtual community-External links:***** at TED conference** a 48MB Quicktime movie, hosted by the Internet Archive...
to use his name in A Slice of Life in My Virtual Community (an article propagated through its inclusion in the Big Dummy's Guide to the Internet) as an example of how people use kill fileKill fileA kill file is a per-user file used by some Usenet reading programs to discard summarily articles matching some unwanted patterns of subject, author, or other header lines.Thus to add a person to one's kill file is to arrange for that person to be ignored...
s:-
... putting the name of a person or topic header in a ``kill file (aka ``bozo filter) means you will never see future contributions from that person or about that topic. You can simply choose to not see any postings from Rich Rosen, or that feature the word ``abortion in the title.
-
- A column by Mr. Protocol (Michael O'Brien) in Sun Expert magazine (now called Server/Workstation Expert) used the word "Rosenesque" to describe a person who produces a substantial volume of e-mailE-mailElectronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...
messages large enough to overwhelm a local network. - The Net.Legends FAQFAQFrequently asked questions are listed questions and answers, all supposed to be commonly asked in some context, and pertaining to a particular topic. "FAQ" is usually pronounced as an initialism rather than an acronym, but an acronym form does exist. Since the acronym FAQ originated in textual...
says:- How can a Net.Legends list omit Rich Rosen? I think he still holds the record for amount of spontaneous, germane text in a single newsgroup (net.philosophyPhilosophyPhilosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...
).
- How can a Net.Legends list omit Rich Rosen? I think he still holds the record for amount of spontaneous, germane text in a single newsgroup (net.philosophy
- In contrast, one system administrator wrote an article entitled "Proposed deletion of Rich Rosen":
- If net.bizarre and net.flame were threats to the network's continued existence, then Rich Rosen is doubly so. ... Rich Rosen's volume is enormous. His postings comprise two percent of the network's volume. ... Expressed as a raw number of bytes per week, the number is horrendous. It is impossible for one man to produce this much cogent thought in a week. Speaking only for myself (perhaps a poor comparison) I don't think I could even type that fast. ... Due to his high volume and near-total lack of redeeming value, I propose that Rich Rosen be removed from USENET. In order to preserve the usual facade of democracy, I'm doing this as a poll. ...
- On the other hand, an article by Thomas Richardson from 1995 said:
- Rosen was particularly noteworthy, because he posted pages
[and] pages of coherent material in just about every group I read. ... This was back when you could read the entire Usenet feed in a single afternoon. That doesn't explain how Rosen managed to post on every subject, though. I think he must have been a speed typist or he must have had some kind of augmented metabolism or something. ... He also managed to stay coherent and to largely avoid repeating himself. Maybe there really was no Rich Rosen. Maybe Dennis RitchieDennis RitchieDennis MacAlistair Ritchie , was an American computer scientist who "helped shape the digital era." He created the C programming language and, with long-time colleague Ken Thompson, the UNIX operating system...
was just playing a weird joke on everybody.
- Rosen was particularly noteworthy, because he posted pages
Post-Bellcore (1990s)
Rosen left Bellcore in 1989, but continued to post occasionally to Usenet from various outside accounts. He was one of the early members of the PanixPanix (ISP)
Panix is the third-oldest ISP in the world after NetCom and the World. Originally running on A/UX on an Apple Macintosh IIfx, Panix has gone through a number of transitions as the Internet has grown. It maintains a vibrant community of shell users and posters to its private panix.* USENET newsgroups...
user community in New York through the mid-1990s. He hosted his own popular "Monty Python
Monty Python
Monty Python was a British surreal comedy group who created their influential Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series...
home page" that was cited by both Lycos and the Global Network Navigator.
During the latter part of the 1990s, Rosen worked at Pencom Web Works with Leon Shklar
Leon Shklar
Leon Shklar is a professor in the computer science department at Rutgers University, where he teaches a senior level course in advanced web application development. He is also the co-author of the popular textbook Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols, and Practices. He is currently...
, with whom he would later collaborate on Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols, and Practices, a widely-used textbook for senior and graduate level college courses in Web application development
Web application development
Web application development is the process and practice of developing web applications.-Risk:Just as with a traditional desktop application, web applications have varying levels of risk. A personal home page is much less risky than, for example, a stock trading web site. For some projects security,...
.
Present day
Today, Rosen lives once again in New JerseyNew Jersey
New Jersey is a state in the Northeastern and Middle Atlantic regions of the United States. , its population was 8,791,894. It is bordered on the north and east by the state of New York, on the southeast and south by the Atlantic Ocean, on the west by Pennsylvania and on the southwest by Delaware...
with his wife, Celia. He is "retired" from posting to Usenet, but now has his own blog to post to. He still writes on the subject of web application development, including articles for various online and print journals, while also working with Leon Shklar on a second edition of their Web Application Architecture book. In addition, he recently contributed material to the fourth edition of Mac OS X for Unix Geeks which was published in the fall of 2008. He continues to record his own music, some of which is accessible on his web site.
Publications
- Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices, 2nd edition, Leon ShklarLeon ShklarLeon Shklar is a professor in the computer science department at Rutgers University, where he teaches a senior level course in advanced web application development. He is also the co-author of the popular textbook Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols, and Practices. He is currently...
, Rich Rosen, 2009, Wiley, ISBN 978-0-470-51860-1. - Mac OS X Leopard for Unix Geeks, 4th edition, Ernest E. Rothman, Brian Jepson, Rich Rosen, 2008, O'Reilly, ISBN 978-0-596-52062-5.