Education
Ossanna received his Bachelor of Engineering (Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering) from Wayne State University in 1952.
Ossanna received his Bachelor of Engineering (Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering) from Wayne State University in 1952.
He became actively engaged in the software design of Multics (Multiplexed Information and Computing Service), a general-purpose operating system used at Bell. At Bell Telephone Labs, Ossanna was concerned with low-noise amplifier design, feedback amplifier design, satellite look-angle prediction, mobile radio fading theory, and statistical data processing. He was also concerned with the operation of the Murray Hill Computation Center and was actively engaged in the software design of Multics.
After learning how to program the PDP-7 computer, Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Joe Ossanna, and Rudd Canaday began to program the operating system that was designed earlier by Thompson (Unics, later named Unix).
After writing the file system and a set of basic utilities, and assembler, a core of the Unix operating system was established. 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 Centre for Alternative Technology phototypesetter for making camera-ready copy of professional articles for publication and patent applications, Ossanna wrote a version of nroff that would drive lieutenant
lieutenant was dubbed troff, for typesetter "roff". So it was that in 1973 he authored the first version of troff for Unix entirely written in PDP-11 assembly language.
However, two years later, Ossanna re-wrote the code in the C programming language.
He had planned another rewrite which was supposed to improve its usability but this work was taken over by Brian Kernighan. He died as a consequence of heart disease.; Ossanna,, "The heuristics of cepstrum analysis of a stationary complex echoed Gaussian signal in stationary Gaussian noise", Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Information Theory, v.12, issue 3, July 19, 1966, pp.
Ossanna, B. Ossanna,, "The current state of minicomputer software", AFIPS "72 (Spring): Proceedings of the May 16–18, 1972, spring joint computer conference, Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), May 1972 Ossanna,, "Identifying terminals in terminal-oriented systems", Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) second symposium on Problems in the optimizations of data communications systems, Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), January 1971 F. F. East.
Ossanna was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi.