Greg Lehey interview – Extreme Geek, APC Magazine, November 2006
Greg “Groggy” Lehey, Australia’s grandad of Unix
He brews computer-controlled beer. Enough said.
Few people in Australia can claim to have lived and breathed Unix and its cousins like Echunga SA resident Greg Lehey.
He is a global geek archetype, having risen as high as ninth in the worldwide Free Software Celebrity list (www.dina.kvl.dk/~abraham/free/fame.html).
Greg wrote his first program in FOCAL on a PDP-8/l with 12KB of memory back in 1969 while he was a chemical engineering student in the UK – and he hasn’t looked back.
He took his first job in 1973 as a systems advisor at Univac in Germany. It was the era of IBM and the Seven Dwarves (Univac, Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric, SDS, RCA and Honeywell), when computers first made an impact outside universities.
Greg pursued a career in *NIX-based programming all over the world, through the Unix Wars of the 1990s, until he landed in South Australia, where he is now a senior software engineer at MySQL.
He recently resigned his long-serving board membership of the Australian Unix Users Group. The energy these days is with Linux Australia, he says, which attracts a younger, more energetic generation.
He rates the coding of the Vinum Volume Manager, a block device driver for virtual disk drives, and his classic O’Reilly book, The Complete FreeBSD, as his two greatest works. Greg bought his first Apple a few years ago, hoping to find tighter GUl-OS integration in Macs. He describes Apple as the most successful Unix vendor ever, but was severely disappointed, saying Apple makes the same mistake as Microsoft: making PCs easier and prettier but severing the link between the GUI and OS.
Despite these serious, deeply considered views on OS architecture, Greg is still a tech-loving geek at heart. He has nine displays on his desk, receives 2,000 emails a day, brews computer-controlled high-tech beer and publishes his mail queue stats online (www.lemis.com/grog/index.html).
– Tim Gaden
Image: Greg casually reclines in the home office and considers his next brew …