81–90 of 171 posts
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…
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.)
> holding down the spacebar will advance the carriage by half a character (and releasing it, in normal use, advances the other half.) backspace did something similar, it was a common error correction to reposition the carriage halfway between two letters to sqeeze-in/add a letter that had been missed (once you get used to computers it's hard to remember that backspace didn't delete anything, it just moved you back)
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.
I have not done any research in Ritchie's PhD thesis, but just as a general hint on the research: besides typewriters there were of course (foto-)typesetting systems at the time capable of producing the output. The Berthold Diatype, for example, dates back to 1952 and would have been able to produce the formulars. It would have required painstaking preparation and a very experienced typesetter - but, possible. Intere…
>Sometimes it only requires a personal relation to make something seemingly impossible happen. That's a very empowering anecdote & story, thank you for sharing it :)
Honestly the best opportunities I’ve had in life (in different decades, too) were all linked to favoritism by this one friend. The message this sends is that I should have more well-connected successful friends. Is this empowering?
I'm curious why they haven't done more forensic typographic analysis of the fonts themselves. There are a number of images of actual Selectric fonts, including [1], and that includes symbols and other variations. Close examination would either confirm the use of that equipment, or else discrepancies would be a valuable clue. Thomas Phinney, Font Detective[2] is the first person I'd ask, as he's done this professional…
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.
> probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist who provided services to the university, 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 i…
maybe everyone in a position like the one he later had, definitely not while he wrote his PhD thesis... but even then, I don't think researchers at Bell Labs had personal secretaries.
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.
Suggesting David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan had this oversight is pretty funny. These are two incredibly well respected computer scientists, Brian Kernighan being one of the main contributers to inventing C and Unix.
Nothing about his thesis suggests that it was done using anything except a typewriter and some engineering (drafting)stencils in common use at the time. Typewriters are capable of arbitrary character alignment (and even rotation with clever abuse of the paper) and engineering stencils were in common usage for all common symbolic figures. I have produced documents with similar and more complex features using those too…
> What is important is the actual work product, which from a typographic perspective is vastly superior to most other math dissertations of the period.
They spend much of the paper attempting to figure out how this would have been typeset. I don’t think the product is quite as trivial as your comment paints it to be, at least. They ask relevant questions in the “Conclusion” section, unaddressed by your remarks.
> How did he (or some typist) manage to sustain such precision for 180 pages, with endless sequences of sub- scripts on superscripts? How did he manage the fractional spacing, especially horizontally, where so far as we know, the devices of the day did not provide a mechanism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…