Huh. I had David Brailsford for CS in 2001.
How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
101–110 of 171 posts
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 :)
Empowering for some, maybe. The anecdote reinforces the now dominant view that networking is everything and people deserve benefits and opportunities that at a different time might be labeled nepotism or favoritism. 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 f…
Thank you & I'm glad to be called out on that. Yes in a just meritocratic world, everyone gets the same opportunities subject to their ability to provision them or ability to learn same. And as an introvert I certainly feel the pain that when it comes to attracting resources that sometimes appear unmerited, my perception is that extroverts & the socially-connected seem to own this game hands-down.
To use parent comment's example, there are many times I wish I could 'professionalize' or increase the perceived production value of something I've put together of a natively raw-looking technical bent (think duck tape & kite string applied to whatever prototype-y technical problem is at hand). In a world where presentation is everything, I might lack the resources to provision that pricey production value (worth not forgetting that as consumers our perceptions update over time on what signals high production value, creating exactly such a market for production value resources). So given an unjust world, when one really needs to make their splash, they manage to network their way to getting asymmetric support for their offering. Is the system unjust? Yes I agree that it is & merits ongoing broad-based effort to even the playing-field. Are consumers (of anything) ever going to stop updating their (our) perceptions of what constitutes high production value? Unlikely, seems like a natural human cost-reducing trait to find signal in noise.
So at least in this unjust world, parent comment has narrated a very real, very human approach to achieving asymmetric support: meeting people in the real world & getting them to appreciate the intrinsic value of whatever it is you're producing. Does such an approach too often get exploited? Obviously - we have plenty of headlines attesting to that, and need to be vigilant to such practices. Parent comment's story doesn't ring to me like that. Does comment-parent shine light on a pathway for those of us trying to get our little-piece-of-value-addition-to-the-world perceived in the needed context? Yes, I believe it does shine that light.
And this introvert is off to the next networking event.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#103Earlier 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.
David Brailsford is an absolute gem, he speaks at length on Numberphile and Computerphile on YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUTypj9XuPp4YBaHucPvr-zis... He has a video about Dennis' thesis here: https://youtu.be/82TxNejKsng
IMHO, he's the David Attenborough of Computer History.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#104Looking through all of this, my own theory is "grotty hack". An extremely capable programmer, with access to all kinds of toys. Doesn't want to write or improve a world-beating document formatter, just get the document printed. You can justify paragraphs easily enough with a simple program. As for the sub/superscripts, why not just annotate something like blah[up]blahblah[up]blah[down][down] etc. and then do a hacky…
I'm thinking of him as a prefigurative example of the now-cliché college dropout startup founder. He was ready to build the future and had grown terribly bored of this giant pile of sterile math about Turing machines. It felt like a ball and chain, not an accomplishment. Being asked to pay to get it bound was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It required a monospaced font to work, and the only thing you got was laying out characters on a 1 x 1/2 space grid. So it wasn't all that fine of control. There was no control over character size. Equations produced by LaTeX or MS Word looked a lot better.
The manuscripts we produced were not journal-ready, though they were certainly thesis-committee-ready. The technology raised the standards, and today, people care about having beautiful manuscripts. The trend was already well on the way by the time I finished grad school. I was one of the few stragglers who didn't value the extra time spent on aesthetic perfection. The students who used LaTeX seemed to take longer to finish.
The only advantage of T3 was speed. I was in a hurry to finish.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#106Looking through all of this, my own theory is "grotty hack". An extremely capable programmer, with access to all kinds of toys. Doesn't want to write or improve a world-beating document formatter, just get the document printed. You can justify paragraphs easily enough with a simple program. As for the sub/superscripts, why not just annotate something like blah[up]blahblah[up]blah[down][down] etc. and then do a hacky…
I'm thinking of him as a prefigurative example of the now-cliché college dropout startup founder. He was ready to build the future and had grown terribly bored of this giant pile of sterile math about Turing machines. It felt like a ball and chain, not an accomplishment. Being asked to pay to get it bound was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Or simply procrastination. If there's no hard deadline and there are more interesting things to do, keep putting it off until it would be embarrassing to bring it up again. And then never mention it again. Who, after all, is proud of, say, an email kept "unread" for 4 months because you really should get to it, and then quietly toggled to "read" because that's now the prudent thing to do (as opposed to following up on it that late). In that context, it also makes sense not to correct anyone referring to you as "Dr. So-and-so". "No, I don't have a PhD... why not... oh because..." never mind. Just let the sleeping dog lie.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#107It 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.
This whole article sounds to me like a prank they made. There are too many things that don't make sense. I wonder if they're making fun of a whole generation that doesn't know how a typewriter works.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it’s empowering. You seem to be under the impression that it is somehow unfair that people don’t have to do everything themselves, and can leverage their social networks to achieve more than they could on their own. I suppose it is unfair to those who, by disability or temperament, don’t build social networks. But so what? Those people are no worse off than they would be in a world where everyone is a shut-in. A…
> And don’t bring socioeconomics into it; In 2003, right before a few new nations entered the European Union, the EU had set up several websites, where people from the new, soon to be, member nations could inform themselfes about each of the current EU member states. The document describing Germany mentioned, under the chapter "Employment", that 80% of all jobs in Germany get distributed via social connections. Now I…
It sounds good to say "we should do something about it," but that ignores the fact that there will always be inequality.
Steve J. and Steve W. knew each other. They knew some other people. They used their social connections to found Apple. As a result of that, bears in the jungles of Darkest Peru can now typeset Dennis Ritchie's thesis in full-color on a supercomputer that fits under their hat next to their marmalade sandwich.
Putting barriers up to prevent this sort of thing in the name of some airy-fairy equity ideology to make people "feel good" isn't the progress some think it is.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#109Earlier 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…
The most useful class I took in high school was Keyboarding (as they called it), which was done on Selectric typewriters. It was just a single-semester course, but it has done more and lasted longer than any other class.
Re: How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
#110This 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…
They knew how it was done, they just make it more attention grabbing so they can have views and readers. They have already done a video and an article about it. If it get more views and attention they'll probably make a book about it too.