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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]

#151

Post by ddingus »

FrojoS wrote: post #131
ddingus wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is both empowering and negative.[0] I got the same mentoring early in life. Networking matters. And yeah the system sucks and is a poor meritocracy, if that itself is even the better state of affairs. Regardless, we live in the system we have and we either work it to our benefit or not. Meta: [0] Naysayers, knowledge is power. Prior to said mentoring, I had near completely dismissed networking, believing is was un…

The "system" is just the underlying nature, isn't it? Nature is not a pure meritocracy. It's more efficient to accomplish work when you work with others, provided you complement each other, and it's easier to work with others if you know them well and can trust them. Having to find new people frequently, learn who they are, what they are capable of, and if they are trustworthy instead of relying on your existing netw…

Underlying nature... You mean as people?

That's a fluid thing. We do not have to run it like we do, and I feel we shouldn't.

So no. It is a contrived thing. Can be changed, should be.

However, at this moment it is also what we live with, so know it well, work it best we can.

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

#152

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.

It is too late for me to edit my other comment, but IBM offered ratchet wheels with double the normal number of teeth (54 rather than 27), providing quarter-line motion, for the Selectric.

p11 https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/typewriter/selectric/PCE-008-1...

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

#153

Post by Maursault »

swamp40 wrote: post #135

> A Typographical Mystery I suspect many people here just haven't used typewriters extensively. You can adjust how the paper is put in before you start typing. You can move it up a little, over a little, etc. You can type the whole thing without subscripts, then put the paper in a second time, adjust it a bit and get all your subscripts. All you need is a repeatable spacing template. And that is easy to do with trans…

> You can adjust how the paper is put in before you start typing. You can move it up a little, over a little, etc.

Try doing that with consistent precision across 180 pages of dissertation. He likely used a typewriter for elements that were pasted in, but in general, for the bulk of it, that could not be what Ritchie did, nor, as stated in TFA, were typewriters of the era capable of it.

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

#154

Post by throwwwaway69 »

Is there an implication that his thesis wasn't actually produced in the year it was claimed to have been made, and in fact made much later? It sort of reads that way but I don't see any explicit mention of this in the paper or comments

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

#155

Post by dm319 »

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…

I think this is the answer. A PhD becomes it's own monster. Several years dedicated to a single project, it becomes a personal part of your identity. The thought of allowing that to stand up against scrutiny to other professors is a tough thing, and back then there weren't such limits on timeframes. As the mental block of submitting it becomes higher, and time moves on, and you get busy with a new job, family life, it gets harder and harder to do that.

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

#156

Post by Slava_Propanei »

zmix wrote: post #99
brookst wrote: post #91

Earlier 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…

[dead]

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

#157

Post by anthk »

tromp wrote: post #62

The Wikipedia page on LOOP [1] contains an excellent overview of the very simple language that is the subject of Dennis' thesis, and that turns out to be equivalent in expressive power to primitive recursive functions. Curiously, one of the instructions in Dennis' original formualtion, namely the assignment X = Y of the value in one register to another, turns out to be redundant, as it it also achieved by X = 0 LOOP…

You are basically describing LISP...

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

#158

Post by fsckboy »

benj111 wrote: post #146
fsckboy wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that clue could be interpreted as "type a space going backward, wiping out what was there" because 0x20 SPC is an ascii character which is a blank, while "space" on a typewriter is an abstract relative concept, depending entirely where you very finely (but very hard to see) positioned the carriage and it's not guaranteed to be blank if you position it where there is some preexisting typewritten ink.

Do the general populace understand a space on a word processor to be an ASCII (or utf) character though. Further how would a backwards space work under that model? Wouldn't that jump back to the previous character? But it's not obvious to me that it would obliterate the previous character

yeah, i don't think the general populace understands, but I'm talking to nerds here who understand ascii and are fascinated by the history of word processing technology, as this entire topic is about :)

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

#159

Post by scoopertrooper »

tniemi wrote: post #116

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 scienti…

You can still use it today!

https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/

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

#160

Post by jsmith45 »

kps wrote: post #152
userbinator wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is too late for me to edit my other comment, but IBM offered ratchet wheels with double the normal number of teeth (54 rather than 27), providing quarter-line motion, for the Selectric. p11 https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/typewriter/selectric/PCE-008-1...

Ok that certainly seems to explain the vertical spacing.

Was there something that would allow for the the fancier horizontal resolution tricks?

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