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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]

#41

Post by jojobas »

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.

They say they sifted through quite some documents of the era and none boasts such precision and command of the typewriter. Maybe they didn't look enough, but maybe it was not your ordinary typist.

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

#43

Post by jhncls »

mrweasel wrote: post #36
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.

It would be hard to beat Edger Dijkstra's handwriting. See e.g. the one numbered 831, where he explains the naturalness of zero-indexing [0].

[0]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF

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

#44

Post by scrame »

qart wrote: post #40
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.

Yeah, Kernighan is the K in K&R as in the other author of "The C Programming Language" as well as the "K" in awk, he's not just some dude speculating.

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

#45

Post by Maxion »

analog31 wrote: post #20
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…

Amusingly there was a word processor called T3, which emulated the Selectric. The Alt button (if I recall correctly, since I used it for my thesis in 1993) switched to the Symbol type ball. Some combination of arrows moved the cursor up and down by a half line. There were macros for some big symbols like the integral and sum. After a bit of practice, it was remarkably quick for doing equations. It used its own font,…

It's kind of remarkable when you think about it that old typewrites from the 1960's gave more user friendly fine control over the document layout and symbols typed than modern word processing software.

Sure LaTeX is a thing, but to call that user friendly is a nightmare.

Word but as a Selectric emulator would be pretty interesting.

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

#46

Post by thrdbndndn »

qart wrote: post #40
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.

And the third one is his younger brother.

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

#47

Post by squokko »

DougMerritt wrote: post #35
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 ju…

"Tulip wheel" is hilarious because a print wheel looks a lot like a daisy and nothing like a tulip.

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

#48

Post by Gigachad »

Maxion wrote: post #45
analog31 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amusingly there was a word processor called T3, which emulated the Selectric. The Alt button (if I recall correctly, since I used it for my thesis in 1993) switched to the Symbol type ball. Some combination of arrows moved the cursor up and down by a half line. There were macros for some big symbols like the integral and sum. After a bit of practice, it was remarkably quick for doing equations. It used its own font,…

It's kind of remarkable when you think about it that old typewrites from the 1960's gave more user friendly fine control over the document layout and symbols typed than modern word processing software. Sure LaTeX is a thing, but to call that user friendly is a nightmare. Word but as a Selectric emulator would be pretty interesting.

That would suggest that fine control over character placement is not something users value that much.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

scrame wrote: post #44
qart wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, Kernighan is the K in K&R as in the other author of "The C Programming Language" as well as the "K" in awk, he's not just some dude speculating.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by carabiner »

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.

Draftsmen used to practice freehand lettering. The end result, without stencils, looked indistinguishable from print.
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