FROM THE ACTING CHAIR This issue of the TCOS Bulletin is the first since I took over from Darrell Long as Acting Chair of the technical committee in July, 1996. An election for Chair will take place in the next few months, beginning with a call for nominations (included in this bulletin and distributed via direct mail). First, I want to express the appreciation of the operating systems community for Darrell's service. In addition to serving as moderator of the most important operating-systems-related newsgroup, comp.os.research, Darrell served as chair of TCOS from 1993 to 1996 and was the TCOS Bulletin editor before that. He has kept TCOS both in good standing in the research community and from a financial standpoint. He has supported numerous conferences and has helped to create new ones, such as the Mobile Computing Workshop held in Santa Cruz in December, 1994. He served as General Chair of the 1996 COMPCON conference as well. I also want to thank Sumi Helal for all his work on the TCOS Bulletin and the TCOS web site, . Under Sumi's care, the bulletin has been published consistently, with a range of useful articles. The web site includes conference announcements, archives of past bulletins, information about the TCOS Executive Committee, and other pointers. Next, I would like to introduce myself. I am a researcher with AT&T Labs - Research, working primarily on Internet-related tools and issues. I worked for several years on operating systems issues for storage management on mobile computers, at AT&T and the Matsushita Information Technology Laboratory. Before that, I worked on operating systems as a postdoctoral fellow at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam (working on Amoeba), and as a Ph.D. student at U.C. Berkeley (working on Sprite). My interests span the range from operating systems to application environments. Finally, I want to solicit volunteers. The TCOS Bulletin needs submissions, both standalone and as special issues. If you wish to submit an article or guest-edit an issue, contact the editor. TCOS can and does sponsor or cosponsor conferences; to organize a new workshop or conference under the auspices of TCOS, contact me. Fred Douglis douglis@research.att.com http://www.research.att.com/~douglis/ Murray Hill, NJ 9 October 1996