51–60 of 171 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
He has a video about Dennis' thesis here: https://youtu.be/82TxNejKsng
>- Why wasn't the degree granted?"
According to [1]
"in 1968, he defended his PhD thesis on "Computational Complexity and Program Structure" at Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer. However, Ritchie never officially received his PhD degree as he did not submit a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library, a requirement for the degree."
So he had bigger and better things to do than mere filing. Plausible!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#:~:text=Howev....
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.
Maybe, but I think everyone in a position like Ritchie's had a personal secretary whose main task was being a professional typist.
>* unless he was adept at spend several hours typing until he got professional results.
Typing was tedious and error prone, that's why people dictated to secretaries who wrote it down in shorthand to type it cleanly later.
I think the role of the secretary at that time is immensely undervalued. Not only had they be good in shorthand and typing but they also served as a kind of editor to check the manuscript for spelling and grammar errors.
Also, for everyone used to that system the introduction of the computer and the burden to type yourself was considered a step back.
That said, it does not at all seem likely to me and I am fully into the typewriter theory. Berthold was not very common in the US and it would have been very expensive. But there were similar systems of US origin and I think other possibilities should be investigated, mentioned and explicitely ruled out. Even metal type must be considered!
Regarding the effort and costs:
During my apprenticeship as a fototype-setter on Berthold systems in the 80s, my girlfriend graduated from senior highschool with a thesis work about colorized photography (analogue of course ;-). I was very passionate about typesetting during my apprenticeship and my dedication was rewarded with free access to all tools, typesetting machines and even the expensive photo papers and film for private use as long as it was in my spare time. So I typesetted the thesis work of my gf on large A3 photopaper in a nice font on a Berthold ads 3000 and she would glue the hand-colorized photographs on it. The result looked better than any photobook you could buy at the time and it was way over top for the requirements of the thesis work.
So there is no reason to dismiss a possibility just on the assumption, that it would have been too expensive or too much of an effort. Sometimes it only requires a personal relation to make something seemingly impossible happen.
>This strange set of circumstances raises at least three broad questions ... >- Why wasn't the degree granted?" According to [1] "in 1968, he defended his PhD thesis on "Computational Complexity and Program Structure" at Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer. However, Ritchie never officially received his PhD degree as he did not submit a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library, a requirem…