Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

bell-labs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 60 posts

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#41

Post by mwbajor »

twobitshifter wrote: post #39

>I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era. This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder…

Are you saying that these smart Bell Labs guys could be put to better use coming up with SW to more efficiently bombard you with ads? Because right now, that seems like the only thing making SV reliable money and the only thing that could support long term basic research... but doesnt.

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#42

Post by OldGuyInTheClub »

twobitshifter wrote: post #39

>I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era. This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder…

A lot of people would stay at Bell Labs because of the culture of frictionless internal collaborations. Don't know about SV, but my senior colleagues and managers all had multiple stories of fending off Universities recruiting their staff. Being reminded them of the freewheeling open-door nature of the place that Universities could not duplicate, a lot of sought-after people stayed put. Not to mention no committee work, grantwriting, or teaching.

But, the company fully expected to lose people to MIT, Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, and other places. It was a point of pride that they could recruit young people of that caliber. Those who did choose to go usually left on good terms with Bell donating lab equipment and staying in touch for access to future students and postdocs.

Source: Physical sciences postdoc in the early 1990s before it went over the cliff and before SV became what it is today

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#43

Post by xarope »

twobitshifter wrote: post #39

>I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era. This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder…

Bell Labs, JPL etc are part of a "lost" era of deep and broad research into CS, just like how NASA's push to the moon led to so many advancements still being used today. I dare say that the timeline of SVs and VC money, with focus on profit, has been the downfall of tech in the last decade or two (how many PhDs does it take to sell ads? There must be a joke about this...)

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#44

Post by lstamour »

civilized wrote: post #29
phkahler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. It's HTML where the whole point is to reflow to fit your window. YOU determine the page width and the content reflows to fit. The problem was when it took off and a bunch of publishers and print people came along and demanded control over the layout. Now they even have custom fonts FFS.

I grew up with simple HTML pages. I love them to death for this reason and others. I'm still very happy every time I come across one that seems to still be alive. I'm sure it was done for a reason - popularity, A/B testing, money, an IMHO misguided sense of aesthetics - but personally, I definitely never asked for the "design"-ization of the web.

The real problem is viewport meta and how you have to opt in or opt out: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m...

If you opt in, a simple page like this ends up looking pretty modern anyway, but plain, while if you opt out, your site is often rendered as if made for an older desktop monitor, like this one.

Another way of putting the problem, we preserved old desktop styles rather than invent new default responsive styles for touch-based browsers.

Without a standard like grey backgrounds and blue links to fall back on, websites had to start making decisions, especially when sites go responsive. At that point it is easier to invent new styles… there aren’t that many useful defaults to fall back on.

This is particularly true for HTML5 form controls, which rarely look good in any browser without styling…

But perhaps there’s hope for the future as new design language becomes HTML tags. E.g. details has an arrow, datalist builds a native autocomplete, and so on. It’s a shame that dialog doesn’t have native formatting tho, or that the idea of creating new, modern default styles hasn’t caught on yet in a cross-browser way.

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#45

Post by indigodaddy »

twobitshifter wrote: post #39

>I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era. This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder…

Why do we care? I think he is/was a genius and would have developed groundbreaking things anywhere, but why the “negative curiosity” and what-ifs? Why not instead celebrate his life and accomplishments instead of dwelling on what he might or mightn’t have done without certain advantages or luck? Did Bell write C for him? These kinds of comments drive me nuts. Downvote as you wish.

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#46

Post by Tor3 »

dev_tty01 wrote: post #38
SoftTalker wrote: post #15

A number of academics seem to have very simple HTML pages like this one. See Knuth's page for example. Most of the Comp Sci professors at my school had pages like this also. Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect. Fortunately there's reader mode.

>Fortunately there's reader mode. Yes, this. Given my older eyesight, having reader mode set to an easily legible larger size makes lots of simple web pages much more readable for me.

Why would some special mode be needed? I use ctrl+ to get a font size I like, then I set my browser window to a size where the text reflows to what I like. HTML is made to make it easy for the reader. And equally easy on mobile (phone, tablet)

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#47

Post by teo_zero »

SoftTalker wrote: post #15

A number of academics seem to have very simple HTML pages like this one. See Knuth's page for example. Most of the Comp Sci professors at my school had pages like this also. Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect. Fortunately there's reader mode.

Why reader mode?! It simply strips all styles and only retains contents. This webpage has no style, so reader mode should do nothing. If you see differences, it means your browser has different defaults for reader mode and normal mode. Choose which you like most and set it as default.

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#48

Post by rramadass »

OldGuyInTheClub wrote: post #42
twobitshifter wrote: post #39

>I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era. This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder…

A lot of people would stay at Bell Labs because of the culture of frictionless internal collaborations. Don't know about SV, but my senior colleagues and managers all had multiple stories of fending off Universities recruiting their staff. Being reminded them of the freewheeling open-door nature of the place that Universities could not duplicate, a lot of sought-after people stayed put. Not to mention no committee wo…

The World would be a much better place if current-day companies practiced such a culture.

The way our current "Work Culture" is setup, it is destroying people's lives.

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#49

Post by mejutoco »

teo_zero wrote: post #47
SoftTalker wrote: post #15

A number of academics seem to have very simple HTML pages like this one. See Knuth's page for example. Most of the Comp Sci professors at my school had pages like this also. Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect. Fortunately there's reader mode.

Why reader mode?! It simply strips all styles and only retains contents. This webpage has no style, so reader mode should do nothing. If you see differences, it means your browser has different defaults for reader mode and normal mode. Choose which you like most and set it as default.

I suspect because reader mode has a reasonable max line lenght, and OP was complaining about that not being set on the page.

Re: Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website

#50

Post by noufalibrahim »

SoftTalker wrote: post #15

A number of academics seem to have very simple HTML pages like this one. See Knuth's page for example. Most of the Comp Sci professors at my school had pages like this also. Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect. Fortunately there's reader mode.

I don't know if all super simple pages are by good people but the reverse has lots of good examples to support it. https://bellard.org/ is another than comes to mind.
Post reply on HN