How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
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Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#2Failing to mention his involvement with the US security services seems like an oversight. We don't know exactly what technology he add access to at the time.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#3It seems that the author never used a typewriter! The typewriter has tabs, so that you can center the equal sign, for example, after 3 tabs, and the alignment will be perfect each time. Most probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist who provided services to the university, unless he was adept at spend several hours typing until he got professional results.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#4It seems that the author never used a typewriter! The typewriter has tabs, so that you can center the equal sign, for example, after 3 tabs, and the alignment will be perfect each time. Most probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist who provided services to the university, unless he was adept at spend several hours typing until he got professional results.
"Most probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist..."
This was already mentioned in the article:
"How did he (or some typist) manage to..."
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#5It seems that the author never used a typewriter! The typewriter has tabs, so that you can center the equal sign, for example, after 3 tabs, and the alignment will be perfect each time. Most probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist who provided services to the university, unless he was adept at spend several hours typing until he got professional results.
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Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#6What a fascinating story!
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#7It seems that the author never used a typewriter! The typewriter has tabs, so that you can center the equal sign, for example, after 3 tabs, and the alignment will be perfect each time. Most probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist who provided services to the university, unless he was adept at spend several hours typing until he got professional results.
"Most probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist..." This was already mentioned in the article: "How did he (or some typist) manage to..."
Or possibly multiple typesetters, as the disparate "4" versions may imply.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#8"The braces are not perfect— clearly they have been done by hand—but they are very precise"
There were plastic template stencils/rulers that let you draw great looking braces.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#9Well, given a pdp-11, runoff, a tulip-wheel printer, a 300- (maybe 1200, forget) baud modem and a pile of 25% rag dissertation paper you too can create a dissertation. Sorta tedious but it worked.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#10> It appears that Dennis was able to replace incorrect copy with new text in the surrounding original copy, but note the extra space in the corrected version. Other than corrections, the January and February versions are identical in every way: February is not a new version, but a copy of the January draft except for corrections. ... The natural explanation is that he used white-out and a Xerox copy machine. Except that there have been no reports from anyone from this era that white-out / replace / Xerox editing treatment was possible at the precision and reproducibility seen here.
Could he have simply retyped the entire page?