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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]

#111

Post by beepbooptheory »

deltarholamda wrote: post #108
zmix wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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, 20 people a year jump to their death in Taiwan alone.

Putting barriers up to prevent this sort of thing in the name of some airy-fairy equity ideology to make people "stay alive" isn't the progress some think it is.

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

#112

Post by tourgen »

syntaxfree wrote: post #84
ricksunny wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

This is how it has always been. This is reality. This is basic human nature. Shaking your fist at the sky and being mad at natural human interactions is silly. Please stop.

The most important thing you can do for your career, for a successful and fulfilled life is to get good at interpersonal relationships. Don't be a weird, anti-social shut-in. Your family, your community, your society are the most important things in life. This is good. This is healthy.

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

#113

Post by Maursault »

AlphaGeekZulu wrote: post #59

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…

> I am fully into the typewriter theory.

I don't think that's possible. I was a typesetter for 14 years throughout the first years of desktop publishing and deep into the 1990s, and though with WYSIWYG software reproducing this would be possible, it also would be painful. I suspect Richie used several methods, including a typewriter, paste up and photocopy, but all the copy was probably output with a line printer with adjustments he made to the software.

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

#114

Post by Maursault »

K0balt wrote: post #70

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…

> Nothing about his thesis suggests that it was done using anything except a typewriter

The repeated and consistent precision is simply not possible with a typewriter alone. I suspect some elements were created with a typewriter, but not most of it.

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

#115

Post by userbinator »

pyentropy wrote: post #71
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.)

> the authors haven't used a typewriter The authors are the famous Kernighan and Brailsford (!). They spent their life on stuff like this, and know him personally very well. They are talking about spacing much finer than half-character.

They are talking about spacing much finer than half-character.

Where? 1/24" is all they mention, which is half the normal 1/12" character spacing.

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

#116

Post by tniemi »

Mentioned here: UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-Hist...

5.3 Early Formatters

The problem was that there was no interactive computer system like CTSS at Princeton; there weren’t any computer termi- nals either. All that was available was punch cards, which only supported upper case letters. I wrote Roff in Fortran (far from ideal, since Fortran was meant for scientific computation, not pushing characters around, but there were no other options) and I added a feature to convert everything to lower case while automatically capitalizing the first letter of each sentence. The resulting text, now upper and lower case, was printed on an IBM 1403 printer that could print both cases. Talk about bleeding edge! My thesis was three boxes of cards. Each box held 2,000 cards, was about 14 inches (35 cm) long and weighed 10 pounds (4.5 kg). The first 1,000 cards were the program and the other 5,000 were the thesis itself in Roff.

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

#117

Post by martinjacobd »

MengerSponge wrote: post #33
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…

> 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.

Just thinking about this makes my spine straighten and my fingers "get ready" to go to the home row :p

We must have used the same application at my school. Though I think I eventually got to 75wpm with no mistakes (or whatever was allowed by the program--three mistakes a minute sticks in my mind but who can remember). It served me well. I live-LaTeXed my lecture notes and homework in college.

I unlearned the habit of backspacing to my mistake, correcting, and retyping. That has served me well.

I wish we had spent more time on accurately typing \ | ( ) , [ ] { } etc.† It would help me now as I still make simple mistakes with that. On the other hand, it only would've been useful to a handful of us.

† In fact, thinking about this brought up the very nostalgic memory of buying C++ for Dummies and the first program listing in it having a vertical pipe character. I had never seen it, and thought it was an ell at first. Well, that didn't compile, so maybe it was a 1? I didn't know! And the listing in the book had an unbroken pipe but my keyboard had a split one, so I couldn't tell these were the same character.

Eventually, I hit every key on the keyboard and then went back through them pressing shift until I found the right character! That was a feeling of enlightenment!

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

#118

Post by kps »

jleyank wrote: post #78
squokko wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What I remember is a cup-shaped daisy wheel rather than the typical flat one. The cup rotated in the horizontal plane while the individual “keys” were vertical and the hammer strike was inside the rotating cup. I’m trying to google this but man, that was a while ago…. Might be mis remembering but it might also have been a patent dodge. Had a “normal” Daisy wheel printer back then, bought it with my kaypro. This was e…

‘Thimble printer’ is the generic term; the NEC Spinwriter series is the primary example.

https://typewriterdatabase.com/197x-nec-spinwriter-7720.7239...

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...

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

#119

Post by kps »

userbinator wrote: post #115
pyentropy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the authors haven't used a typewriter The authors are the famous Kernighan and Brailsford (!). They spent their life on stuff like this, and know him personally very well. They are talking about spacing much finer than half-character.

They are talking about spacing much finer than half-character. Where? 1/24" is all they mention, which is half the normal 1/12" character spacing.

There's vertical spacing of 1/24″ in some places, which is twice the usual Selectric precision (6lpi with half-line motion). To me the most likely explanation is a Selectric variation with twice the detents, or even a third-party add-on, made specifically for technical reports.

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

#120

Post by civilized »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #106
civilized wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

Yeah, my imagined likely scenario involves that too. Maybe stuff at Bell Labs was really picking up and he's trying to finish the thesis, but it still has a few minor typos. He can't abide knowing about these and turning it in, but even with his formidable diligence, he can't stomach reprinting the whole damn thing and thoroughly reviewing it for the 27th time.

I completed a very interesting postdoc to start a new job, and even then, it took me a couple years to tie up loose ends and give them the finished deliverables I felt I owed them.

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