Joseph Frank Ossanna Jr. (December 10, 1928 – November 28, 1977) was an American electrical engineer and computer programmer who worked as a member of the technical staff at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. He became actively engaged in the software design of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a general-purpose operating system used at Bell.
Education and career
Ossanna received his Bachelor of Engineering (B.S.E.E.) from Wayne State University in 1952. Doug McIlroy later wrote, "Ossanna, with the instincts of a motor pool sergeant, equipped our first lab and attracted the first outside users."
When the team got a Graphic Systems CAT phototypesetter for making camera-ready copy of professional articles for publication and patent applications, Ossanna wrote a version of nroff that would drive it. It was dubbed troff, for typesetter roff.
Ossanna was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi.
Selected publications
- Bogert, Bruce P.; Ossanna, Joseph F., "The heuristics of cepstrum analysis of a stationary complex echoed Gaussian signal in stationary Gaussian noise", IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, v.12, issue 3, July 19, 1966, pp. 373 – 380
- Ossanna, Joseph F.; Kernighan, Brian W., Troff user's manual, UNIX Vol. II, W. B. Saunders Company, March 1990
- Kernighan, B W; Lesk, M E; Ossanna, J F Jr., Document preparation, in UNIX:3E system readings and applications. Volume I: UNIX:3E time-sharing system, Prentice-Hall, Inc., December 1986
- Ossanna, Joseph F., "The current state of minicomputer software", AFIPS '72 (Spring): Proceedings of the May 16–18, 1972, spring joint computer conference, Publisher: ACM, May 1972
- Ossanna, Joseph F., "Identifying terminals in terminal-oriented systems", Proceedings of the ACM second symposium on Problems in the optimizations of data communications systems, Publisher: ACM, January 1971
- Ossanna, J. F.; Saltzer, J. H., "Technical and human engineering problems in connecting terminals to a time-sharing system", AFIPS '70 (Fall): Proceedings of the November 17–19, 1970, fall joint computer conference, Publisher: ACM, November 1970
- Ossanna, J. F.; Mikus, L. E.; Dunten, S. D., "Communications and input/output switching in a multiplex computing system", AFIPS '65 (Fall, part I): Proceedings of the November 30—December 1, 1965, fall joint computer conference, part I, Publisher: ACM, November 1965