george (04/07/83)
I heard this on the April 5 "McNeil Lehrer Report". As far as I know this will not affect the trb project (i.e. Andy Tannenbaum).
trb (04/07/83)
Yes, TRB (the journalist) has retired. I heard him interviewed last week on All Things Considered. He wrote primarily for some magazine (the National Review?) but I used to read him in the Washington Post (or was it the Star?) He is well into his 70's and has been working out of Washington for a very long time. I forget his real name, but I'll tell you why he's called TRB. At the beginning of his career he was working for one of the (many) NYC dailies and he was sent south to become their Washington bureau. For some reason he was to be anonymous, and he needed a pseudonym. His boss rode to work each morning on the BRT, Brooklyn Rapid Transit (subway). The initials were reversed and he became TRB. How did I become trb? Well. Not from Brooklyn Rapid Transit, I'm a Bronx boy. When I went to Worcester Tech, I was called Tribble by a hacker who got the name from (of course) the Star Trek episode "The Trouble with Tribbles." He thought I had lots in common with a Tribble, in appearance and personality. We had a DEC-10 (ahhh) and the tradition of three letter nicknames arose from the fact that three SIXBIT ASCII characters fit into a PDP-10 halfword, hence trb (actually, originally TRB, but I'm a UNIX hacker now). Now you know. Andy Tannenbaum Bell Labs Whippany, NJ (201) 386-6491
bj (04/12/83)
Yes, TRB (the journalist) has retired. The journalist who has written under the TRB pseudonym in *The New Republic* for the past 40 years has retired. His name is Richard L. Strout and he has been writting the TRB column (except for vacations) since March 1943. He will still be writting for the *Christian Scientist Monitor*, doing either one or two columns a week. The column has continued, but I do not know who it writting it. Dick Strout was not the original TRB, the column was started in 1925. The story about TRB standing for Brooklyn Rapid Transit is favored by Strout, but is not true -- there is no such line. Another story is that it came from the Time Roman Bold typeface. A variation of the subway story is that it came from crushing together IRT (Interboro Rapid Transit) and BMT (Brooklyn Manhattan Transit). This version has the advantage of beging based on lines that exist. A third hypothesis is that the column was originally written by a "revolving stable of young reporters" called "The Rover Boys". The true story seems to have been lost. If you want more information on TRB, check out the 18 April, 1983 issue of *The New Republic*. B.J. Herbison-BJ@Yale decvax!yale-comix!herbison-bj