How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#21

Post by tkgally » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:54 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #17

This is a non-mystery. It looks like this was done with a Selectric typewriter using two typeballs, one of them "Symbols 10", and the other for text.[1] The reason there are two versions of "4" is because you could type something like "(4.10)" with either the regular typeball or the Symbols ball. Both have numbers, parentheses, upper case letters, and a period/decimal point. Switching typeballs takes a few seconds, s…

It looks like a Selectric to me, too. I worked for several years in the early 1980s in a university office equipped with Selectrics. Nothing in the examples shown looks as though it couldn’t have been done with a Selectric and some careful planning and execution.

When typing documents like the ones shown, the typist would count characters and plan the centering and alignment of columns in advance. I can remember marking up manuscripts with pencil before starting to type on a clean piece of paper. If you made mistakes that couldn't be corrected with whiteout or correction tape, you typed the page again.

I took some mathematics classes from Paul Halmos at UC Santa Barbara in the late 1970s. He and his wife invited a group of students to their home for dinner, and his secretary joined us as well. I remember her saying that she enjoyed the challenge of typing mathematical manuscripts even though she didn’t understand the math.

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#22

Post by philistine » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 3:57 AM UTC

iJohnDoe wrote: post #12

Maybe a time traveler. Remember, there were people scraping the Internet looking for things that were posted that might indicate someone was a time traveler? Maybe Dennis Ritchie was given some advanced information and given access to advanced technology (US security service that someone else mentioned)? Something fun to think about.

You've got a time traveling machine, and you give someone XeTeX of all things! That's a cruel joke.

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#23

Post by NoZebra120vClip » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 4:38 AM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #19

analog31 wrote: post #18

For sake of reference, in the 1950s my parents both took their theses to a typist, which was the standard operating procedure. You could do it yourself, but multiple copies were needed, and only a typist could do it accurately enough to trust themselves with carbon paper. Correcting mistakes on carbons was a mess. Chemical diagrams, graphs, and equations, were all done by hand. Theses were shorter.

In the late 60s, my mother typed my father's thesis -- because she knew how to touch type and he didn't.

In the mid-1980s, I inherited my mother's Smith-Corona and she sternly informed me that I'd better learn how to type before entering high school, because I was gonna have a lot of papers to write.

That was the best advice that Mom ever gave me. Not only did I top 30wpm by the end of that summer class, I'd met our band director who was the typing teacher, and he'd put me on alto saxophone. I stuck with band for 4 years, learned lots about music and stage performance, earned an academic letter. Fast forward 40 years, and I'm still typing 100wpm and using it professionally, for personal business and recreation. Thanks Mom! Thanks, Smith-Corona!

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#24

Post by jseutter » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 4:42 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #14

We have no idea how it would even be possible to make these horizontal adjustments with the typing machines of the time. I agree with the other comment here that the authors haven't used a typewriter, or at least in enough detail to know that on many if not all of them, holding down the spacebar will advance the carriage by half a character (and releasing it, in normal use, advances the other half.)

Similarly the authors talk about how the multiline brackets were hand-drawn, and how could they be that precise? They might now know how common engineering stencils were for such things. Just find the bracket of the right size, and trace it onto the page.

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#25

Post by ggm » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 5:55 AM UTC

cup wrote: post #2

Failing 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.

Much though I loved the original man from U.N.C.L.E. they didn't actually have access to significantly better electric typewriters than the rest of us. Ritchie and his professional typists used commodity typing machines, with the interchange of fonts, and mechanical positioning capability of the best of breed in market at the time.

If you needed to forge russian or german papers, you used second hand russian typewriters. They were available. the NSA didn't have magic 1200dpi+ printing any more than anyone else did in the time of phototypesetting: the magic here was how good the lenses and film were. Type foundries did the best they could with large images and then reduced them onto film.

Scientific papers right up to the 1980s accepted hand drawn images: I know because I submitted some, for state-event flow diagrams on an OSI protocol implementation. They published my hand drawn circles and lines.

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#26

Post by thewebcount » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 5:57 AM UTC

NoZebra120vClip wrote: post #23

cperciva wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the late 60s, my mother typed my father's thesis -- because she knew how to touch type and he didn't.

In the mid-1980s, I inherited my mother's Smith-Corona and she sternly informed me that I'd better learn how to type before entering high school, because I was gonna have a lot of papers to write. That was the best advice that Mom ever gave me. Not only did I top 30wpm by the end of that summer class, I'd met our band director who was the typing teacher, and he'd put me on alto saxophone. I stuck with band for 4 year…

In the early 1980s our family got an Apple ][+ computer and I started printing out my book reports, etc. for my 5 and 6th grade assignments. My teachers didn’t want to accept them at first thinking that I must somehow be cheating. I’m not sure what that would have involved. Maybe they thought my parents were typing writing them for me and to cover it up, they typed it so the handwriting wouldn’t be different? But it was clear from the content that I wrote them myself, so eventually they accepted it. Here I was trying to make things nicer and they just couldn’t believe it!

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#27

Post by cornholio » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 5:57 AM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #14

We have no idea how it would even be possible to make these horizontal adjustments with the typing machines of the time. I agree with the other comment here that the authors haven't used a typewriter, or at least in enough detail to know that on many if not all of them, holding down the spacebar will advance the carriage by half a character (and releasing it, in normal use, advances the other half.)

The thesis has even finer horizontal spacing, creating a perfect centering effect of variable width line numbers, while the rest text on the same line is grid aligned. It's not something you do with a typewriter, unless you are a computer science PhD.

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#28

Post by ggm » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 5:57 AM UTC

Why is it called T/Roff? Because of NROFF.

Why is NROFF called NROFF? Because of RUNOFF.

Why did DEC call it RUNOFF? because there was a strong tendency to short names for commands. 6 letters in 6 bit notation fit in a 36 bit word: the Dec-10 which had runoff, had 36 bit words.

RUNOFF begat NROFF begat TROFF begat DITROFF

OFFset printing. Indirect transfer of the image to paper from a plate, which can be photo-litho exposed.

If you can control the phototypesetter, you can print at higher quality than you can type.

Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]

#29

Post by laserbeam » Thu, Mar 16, 2023, 6:02 AM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #3

It 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.

As far as I understand, the author argues the typewriters of the era couldn't do that. I have no knowledge about what typewriters existed back then, but any criticism of that claim should also be specific to the time period and not just typewriters in general. (I find it plausible that typewriters in the 60s had the feature you describe, it's just not clear).

For the use of whiteout, for example, the date claim is much more specific in the article.