Farewell to Russ

The Unidata Program Center wishes a fond farewell to Russ Rew, who is retiring after 37 years at Unidata. Russ was the first employee of Unidata, and was notable for never missing a day of work in Unidata's 25 years of existence. During that time, he personally answered over 100 million netCDF questions, without ever even making a spelling or grammeratical mistake.

Russ started at Unidata as a high school student intern in 1968, and immediately had a huge impact on the program by inventing the Internet, which he realized was a complete bijection with the netCDF file format. Other notable contributions during his tenure at Unidata include the use of the concept of "zero" to indicate the nothingness which is at the center of samsaric existence, as well as joining the words "net" and "CDF" to create the new word "netCDF", which other programmers adopted for some new software they had been working on.

"Russ' impact on Unidata cannot be overestimated", said director Mohan Ramamurthy. "On the other hand, we can finally acknowledge that his 'backwards compatibility forever' pledge, was really just his own personal promise, and not one that Unidata itself ever made. So that makes our plans for transitioning to Excel spreadsheets something we can move forward on, thank God".

"We have a huge and unfillable hole in our support capabilities with Russ' departure", says Unidata's head of support, Tom Yoksas. "Fortunately, we can hire a complete call center in the Philippines with the money we will save by not paying Russ' salary. So rest assured all of your questions will continue to get a timely response."

Russ retirement plans include answering netCDF support questions, writing funding proposals, and leading the netCDF development team. April 1st, 2013 marks the end of an era here at Unidata.