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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]

#31

Post by teleforce »

The paper posed three questions but only cater for the last one i.e. on the how was the thesis prepared?

It'd be very interesting to see further research on the very first question regarding the contributions elements of the thesis due to the overwhelming popularity of the C programming languages that most of the popular modern programming languages are based upon it including C++, Matlab, Java, Python, Ruby, C#, D, Go, Swift, Rust and even the latest proposed TenetLang programming language by GPT-4 [1].

[1]GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177857

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

#32

Post by ChickeNES »

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.

What's the source of that? It's not mentioned on his Wikipedia page and Google was next to useless trying to find anything.

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

#33

Post by MengerSponge »

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.

I'm a millennial born after the introduction of the Macintosh, who took a typing class in a public middle school. I don't remember the application, but it emulated a typewriter. We had to center text manually (count the number of characters, divide by two, backspace that many times, etc). The backspace key didn't delete characters, and mistakes counted against your wpm scores.

I'm a much faster typist if I'm allowed to correct what I'm typing as I go (~75 wpm), but I guess it's useful sometimes to know how to engage the 40wpm "actually get every character exactly right without even looking at the cursor" mode to transcribe documents.

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

#34

Post by MengerSponge »

philistine wrote: post #22
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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTc_j6sqkxA

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

#35

Post by DougMerritt »

jleyank wrote: post #9

Well, 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.

What is a "tulip-wheel printer"? I get no search results. If you meant "daisy-wheel printer", wikipedia says that was 1970 and later. [1]

Just as general interest, not because I have reason to think it was used for his thesis, the "Friden Flexowriter" was quite heavily used with computers back then, including at MIT (don't know about Harvard), and it had many models -- one of which, interestingly enough, supported justification, the "Justowriter". [2]

It was mentioned in Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. [3]

P.S. the poor guy might even have had to suffer with 110 baud, which was not uncommon back then -- and was slower than reading speed.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

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

#36

Post by mrweasel »

sedatk wrote: post #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.

The whole thing is probably done by hand and Ritchie just had excellent handwriting.

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

#38

Post by stevenjgarner »

welder wrote: post #30

The actual PhD thesis[pdf], the topic of discussion: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... Found here [0] with two copies archived: * Dennis Ritchie’s personal copy [1] * Albert Meyer’s copy [2] [0] https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies... [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10278497... [2] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/1027909…

During my undergraduate study of physics at Otago University in New Zealand in the 1970's it became pretty apparent that typing would become central to computing, so I took the Pitman speed typing class and got certified.

As a certified Pitman typist from that era, I can say that there is nothing inconsistent to me about this document being typed on a typewriter.

It was also common practice to use Letraset to add any characteristics to the page not otherwise available on the typewriter [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letraset

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

#40

Post by qart »

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.)

I recognized the names of two of the authors immediately, David F. Brailsford, and Brian W. Kernighan. Not only are they both contemporaries of Ritchie, but Kernighan was a close colleague too.
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