Education and Career
Ossanna received his Bachelor of Engineering (B.S.E.E.) from Wayne State University in 1952.
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.
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'. 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, he 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.
Mr. Ossanna was a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, Sigma Xi, and Tau Beta Pi.
He died as a consequence of heart disease.
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