[HN Gopher] How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typ...
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How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical
mystery (2022) [pdf]
Author : tkhattra
Score : 441 points
Date : 2023-03-16 01:39 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cs.princeton.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cs.princeton.edu)
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| 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. Interestingly, Berthold
| introduced an internal metric system for their fototypesetters of
| 48 units (in relation to the metrics of the hot metal body),
| fitting quite nicely with the 1/12 grid.
|
| That said, it does not at all seem likely to me and I am fully
| into the typewriter theory. Berthold was not very common in the
| US and it would have been very expensive. But there were similar
| systems of US origin and I think other possibilities should be
| investigated, mentioned and explicitely ruled out. Even metal
| type must be considered!
|
| Regarding the effort and costs:
|
| During my apprenticeship as a fototype-setter on Berthold systems
| in the 80s, my girlfriend graduated from senior highschool with a
| thesis work about colorized photography (analogue of course ;-).
| I was very passionate about typesetting during my apprenticeship
| and my dedication was rewarded with free access to all tools,
| typesetting machines and even the expensive photo papers and film
| for private use as long as it was in my spare time. So I
| typesetted the thesis work of my gf on large A3 photopaper in a
| nice font on a Berthold ads 3000 and she would glue the hand-
| colorized photographs on it. The result looked better than any
| photobook you could buy at the time and it was way over top for
| the requirements of the thesis work.
|
| So there is no reason to dismiss a possibility just on the
| assumption, that it would have been too expensive or too much of
| an effort. Sometimes it only requires a personal relation to make
| something seemingly impossible happen.
| Maursault wrote:
| > 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.
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| Formulas and tables much more intricate than that of Dennis'
| PhD, were typeset in metal type and letterpress printed a
| hundred years ago. It was just so incredibly much work, that
| the "generation DTP" cannot even imagine the efforts.
|
| I finished my typesetter apprenticeship in 1984. Although we
| had the most sophisticated fototypesetting systems of the
| time, we were not able to produce font outlines of arbitrary
| fonts (we had a few specialised outline font plates, though).
|
| To create an outline, I would typeset the desired text, put
| it on film, make a negative contact copy of the film and then
| do a series of contact copies of both the positive and
| negative film with interlayed dispersion sheets to the
| effect, that the positive would become leaner and leaner and
| the negative bolder and bolder. When the desired outline
| stroke width was reached, I would very carefully assemble
| both on top of each other, take a photo with the reproduction
| camera and do a final contact copy to a positive on paper.
| This would typically occupy me for half a day.
|
| 2 years later I was doing desktop publishing and it was
| possible to create an outline just with a click of the mouse
| and for any font and possibly with custom stroke width. I was
| presenting desktop publishing systems at trade shows, and
| once a dude asked me to do this and this and I complied
| willingly. Then he wanted me to make an outline, which I did,
| and then he wanted me to put a color gradient on the outline
| (which was not possible at the time, but shortly after) and I
| just had to laugh about the presumptuousness of the people
| that had no typesetting background. But sure enough, DTP
| would make all this possible in an incredibly short time...
| Maursault wrote:
| > DTP would make all this possible in an incredibly short
| time...
|
| From proof to press, sure, near instant, but DTP doesn't
| have any effect whatsoever on actually setting the type,
| which couldn't be done with a mere wave of a mouse. It
| might take a couple weeks to typeset 180 pages, and at the
| precision of Ritchie's originals, it would be a harrowing
| couple of weeks. You couldn't just flow the text into a
| stylesheet, you'd need to create every page individually
| (unless flow didn't matter).
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| I agree. And I should really look into the full work...
| ricksunny wrote:
| >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 :)
| syntaxfree wrote:
| 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 friends. Is this empowering?
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Nothing was mentioned about "deserving". Just reality. I
| don't understand why you'd see the need to impute - and
| then immediately criticise - some sort of judgement into a
| bare statement of fact.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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 unnecessary and a sign of poor skills and other such
| ideas. Realizing how things actually do work was literally
| life changing.
|
| If impacts like that are not signs of empowerment, I do not
| know what is.
|
| Meritocracy sounds nice, and perhaps is a worthy state of
| affairs, that is not currently the system we live in. That
| may be hard news. Was to me.
|
| As always, it sure would be nice and far more productive to
| read a rebuttal...
| FrojoS wrote:
| 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 network is not
| efficient.
|
| A political system in which these fundamental rules of
| nature are forcefully suppressed, e.g. a pure
| meritocracy, is a horrible system, in my view.
| Fortunately, if something is not efficient, it will be
| replaced by something efficient in the long run.
| ddingus wrote:
| 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.
| ddingus wrote:
| I don't see nature as a pure meritocracy myself. I have
| had a large number of people express the desire for "the
| system" to be a pure, very functional meritocracy, and I
| myself envisioned it more that way much earlier in life.
|
| As for efficency... Maybe! There are strong arguments
| either way. I prefer a base network, with fluid edges
| able to respond with depth and breadth.
| ricksunny wrote:
| 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.
| kiliantics wrote:
| In a way, I believe the idea of a "just, meritocratic
| world" masks the actual underlying problem -- that we do
| not have measures in place to prevent individuals or
| small groups from gaining grossly disproportionate levels
| of power in our society. We wouldn't need to keep the
| natural human inclination of socialising and networking
| in check if all it ever resulted in was a few nicer
| looking photo books.
|
| In my interactions outside of professional life, I find
| such happy coincidences of skills and connections to lead
| to outcomes that simply enrich everyone, like how this
| photo album surely pleased the commenter, the gf, the
| school teachers, etc. Rarely does anything like this hurt
| anyone. Sure, someone might be a little more popular in a
| social circle for a time because of some cool thing they
| made with their cool friends, but these kinds of things
| are transient and -- in a context of conditions of
| fairness -- some other person with some other cool new
| thing will eventually displace them.
|
| In a capitalist world where "cool new things" can lead to
| concentration of wealth that can be guarded and leveraged
| to create more, then networking (familial/nepotistic or
| otherwise) can lead to unfair outcomes. But the idea of a
| meritocratic system still leads to the same unfair
| outcomes, just decided on a different and still somewhat
| arbitrary set of requirements.
| brookst wrote:
| 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.
|
| And don't bring socioeconomics into it; social access to a
| specific typesetting machine might be less likely at lower
| income, but access to e.g. machine shops is more likely,
| and arguably more valuable.
|
| Yes, it is empowering that people can achieve more by
| working as a team with their friends and family than they
| could on their own. Like any good thing, there are
| downsides, and we should be wary of nepotism in zero sum
| things like hiring, but gp's typesetter was going to sit
| idle had they not used it. This is an empowering story.
| zmix wrote:
| > 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 am still in
| shock and it may be, that this includes the employment
| office, but the chances to get a good job, as either an
| immigrant or a socially marginalized person, is low.
|
| So, bringing socioeconomics into play is totally
| acceptable.
|
| I do not think one should reject any social privileges
| one has, but one also should respect, that this is not
| the case for everybody and do something about it.
| potatototoo99 wrote:
| How is that at all surprising in a time of less globalism
| and internet penetration?
|
| People in small town of course know each other and use
| word of mouth to find candidates, for example.
|
| What were they supposed to do, put on an advert on the
| national newspapers for every vacancy in the country?
| FrojoS wrote:
| In other words 20% of jobs were distributed via the much
| less efficient and risky approach of job adds, formal
| applications, HR scanning CVs for buzzwords and
| credentials, lengthy interview vetting process, etc.
|
| I agree with OP. It is empowering that you can achieve
| more when working with people you know well and trust.
|
| You mention that this makes it harder for immigrants. Of
| course it does. Immigration is disruptive to once life.
| It only makes sense to migrate, if the prospects at the
| new place are much better, despite effectively loosing
| access to your existing network at home. Of course it
| will take time, to re-build such a network.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I've moved within a Canadian province (about 750km) and
| it was pretty disruptive.
|
| Friends and family are far, kids are challenging without
| that village, nobody knows you from around, etc. Like you
| say, though, the new place looked much better than the
| old one.
|
| Couldn't imagine doing it from half a planet away.
| deltarholamda wrote:
| 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.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| 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.
| david-gpu wrote:
| Perhaps the message is that you can be that friend for
| somebody else. After all, being an apprentice typesetter is
| not exactly being "well-connected and successful".
| tcgv wrote:
| > The message this sends is that I should have more well-
| connected successful friends. Is this empowering?
|
| We can also view it from another perspective. Even in a
| fair society where everyone has socioeconomic balanced
| connections, a situation where someone has access to
| advanced photography/printing tools at the same time this
| person's girlfriend needs to produce her thesis could still
| arise.
|
| Looking at the situation positively, we can say that the
| empowering aspect is that synergic opportunities can arise
| unexpectedly, enabling outstanding work to be accomplished.
|
| However, it's true that the society we currently live in is
| far from fair and balanced.
| AlphaGeekZulu wrote:
| I think, I have to clear up a little bit!
|
| First, I had no message in relation to
| empowering/networking or the like!
|
| I told the little anecdote with this in mind: if someone
| found the thesis work of my former girlfriend (now spouse),
| and investigated its production method, and would correctly
| conclude that it was typeset in junks on a Berthold ads
| 3000 typesetting system, then pasted up on film on a
| lighttable, than blown up with a reproduction camera and
| then contact printed on A3 photopaper - the investigator
| might be tempted to dismiss the diagnosis, as the effort
| and costs are absolutely ludicrous in relation to the
| importance of the work. I just showed how such an obvious
| discrepancy can have a very plausible explanation.
|
| For the "justice" part: my gf asked the teacher for
| permission to have the work typeset by her boyfriend and
| the teacher consented, making clear, that only text content
| and quality of the practical work (the colorized
| photographs) would be considered for grading, not the outer
| form as this would put her "out of competition". This was
| also outlined in the written assessment. In addition, every
| 3rd party involvement had to be declared in the
| preposition. It was also only possible, because the thesis
| subject was of artistic nature, where no strict rules for
| outer form existed.
| bityard wrote:
| Thank you for your anecdote, I thought it was a fun read.
| I am saddened that the most common response of many HNers
| is to turn every interesting story into a pessimistic
| lamentation of society. We need more glass-half-full
| people around here to balance things out.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| Looks, money, contacts, intelligence, knowledge. These are
| all things that help bring about more/better opportunities
| for a person. They are all things that some people have
| more of innately and can be improved with effort. Is life
| fair that some people start out with more of some of them?
| No, but life isn't fair. But is the fact that you can focus
| on improving the above things for yourself and it will help
| you succeed in life empowering? I would certainly say yes.
| tourgen wrote:
| [dead]
| jefftk wrote:
| _> It appears that Dennis was able to replace incorrect copy with
| new text in the surrounding original copy, but note the extra
| space in the corrected version. Other than corrections, the
| January and February versions are identical in every way:
| February is not a new version, but a copy of the January draft
| except for corrections. ... The natural explanation is that he
| used white-out and a Xerox copy machine. Except that there have
| been no reports from anyone from this era that white-out /
| replace / Xerox editing treatment was possible at the precision
| and reproducibility seen here._
|
| Could he have simply retyped the entire page?
| timcederman wrote:
| Sure, but why leave the extra space there after retyping it?
| Still possible though.
| jefftk wrote:
| You have to leave extra space somewhere when shortening it,
| and if you already like the page layout this guarantees you
| don't mess up anything else.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Huh. I had David Brailsford for CS in 2001.
| fxtentacle wrote:
| I thought that his thesis disappeared because he had military
| connections and this stuff was too good to share with potential
| enemies. That would also explain how he could white-out and copy
| a document before xerox became widely available. The military
| probably had early access to the technology needed to duplicate
| documents, such as maps or code tables.
| raphlinus wrote:
| 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 professionally, though I have done a bit of it
| myself.
|
| [1]: http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html
|
| [2]: https://thefontdetective.com/
| codezero wrote:
| That does seem to answer one of the questions raised about why
| there are two different formats for the number 4, and one of
| the ones used is included in several of the selectric fonts
| linked here.
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| This 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, so it's only done when necessary.
|
| There was a little lever on some Selectrics which displaced the
| carriage horizontally by half a space.[2] So, if you really
| needed half spacing, it was available. But you had to hold the
| spring-loaded lever in place while typing, so this was rarely
| used. It was used for fixing typos by erasing two characters and
| squeezing in three. It was also possible to move the paper a
| half-line vertically.
|
| This is tedious work, and there were pro typists who did it for
| money. This was a manual job.
|
| All this is on Google.
|
| [1]
| https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple...
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter
| ezconnect wrote:
| 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.
| analog31 wrote:
| Amusingly there was a word processor called T3, which emulated
| the Selectric. The Alt button (if I recall correctly, since I
| used it for my thesis in 1993) switched to the Symbol type
| ball. Some combination of arrows moved the cursor up and down
| by a half line. There were macros for some big symbols like the
| integral and sum.
|
| After a bit of practice, it was remarkably quick for doing
| equations. It used its own font, that looked like a mono-spaced
| Times Roman.
| Maxion wrote:
| 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.
| vore wrote:
| I think this is something very few people actually need to
| do, and you can still do it if you want to! But it makes
| sense that it's no longer a front and center feature.
| Gigachad wrote:
| That would suggest that fine control over character
| placement is not something users value that much.
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| newaccount74 wrote:
| The correction mentioned in the article ("appreciations"
| instead of "applications") also makes it sound very plausible
| that the text was typed by someone other than the author
| himself.
| tkgally wrote:
| It looks like a Selectric to me, too. I worked for several
| years in the early 1980s in a university office equipped with
| Selectrics. Nothing in the examples shown looks as though it
| couldn't have been done with a Selectric and some careful
| planning and execution.
|
| When typing documents like the ones shown, the typist would
| count characters and plan the centering and alignment of
| columns in advance. I can remember marking up manuscripts with
| pencil before starting to type on a clean piece of paper. If
| you made mistakes that couldn't be corrected with whiteout or
| correction tape, you typed the page again.
|
| I took some mathematics classes from Paul Halmos at UC Santa
| Barbara in the late 1970s. He and his wife invited a group of
| students to their home for dinner, and his secretary joined us
| as well. I remember her saying that she enjoyed the challenge
| of typing mathematical manuscripts even though she didn't
| understand the math.
| meganlawson wrote:
| [dead]
| cup wrote:
| Failing to mention his involvement with the US security services
| seems like an oversight. We don't know exactly what technology he
| add access to at the time.
| ChickeNES wrote:
| What's the source of that? It's not mentioned on his Wikipedia
| page and Google was next to useless trying to find anything.
| ggm wrote:
| Much though I loved the original man from U.N.C.L.E. they
| didn't actually have access to significantly better electric
| typewriters than the rest of us. Ritchie and his professional
| typists used commodity typing machines, with the interchange of
| fonts, and mechanical positioning capability of the best of
| breed in market at the time.
|
| If you needed to forge russian or german papers, you used
| second hand russian typewriters. They were available. the NSA
| didn't have magic 1200dpi+ printing any more than anyone else
| did in the time of phototypesetting: the magic here was how
| good the lenses and film were. Type foundries did the best they
| could with large images and then reduced them onto film.
|
| Scientific papers right up to the 1980s accepted hand drawn
| images: I know because I submitted some, for state-event flow
| diagrams on an OSI protocol implementation. They published my
| hand drawn circles and lines.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| jojobas wrote:
| They say they sifted through quite some documents of the era
| and none boasts such precision and command of the typewriter.
| Maybe they didn't look enough, but maybe it was not your
| ordinary typist.
| jonwinstanley wrote:
| 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.
| coliveira wrote:
| 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.
| ehecatl42 wrote:
| Kernighan also wrote Pic, a *roff/*TeX preprocessor. He knows
| a thing or two about typesetting. And, obviously, he's the
| 'K' in AWK.
| laserbeam wrote:
| As far as I understand, the author argues the typewriters of
| the era couldn't do that. I have no knowledge about what
| typewriters existed back then, but any criticism of that claim
| should also be specific to the time period and not just
| typewriters in general. (I find it plausible that typewriters
| in the 60s had the feature you describe, it's just not clear).
|
| For the use of whiteout, for example, the date claim is much
| more specific in the article.
| weinzierl wrote:
| Having used a typewriter I can confirm what raphlinus wrote
| above.
|
| Moreover you would not have to use tabs necessarily. A
| typewriter is an analogue device with a roller on a sled.
| It's not that there are fixed character cells like in a
| computer. When you press a button the roller usually moves a
| fixed distance but you can suppress that and position the
| roller freely. You also can position your characters freely
| in the vertical direction by turning the roller with a knob
| on its side. Basically characters could be placed on the
| sheet without restrictions. To get an idea what was possible
| look up _Typewriter Art_.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| The thing is what all those spacings are quite consistent
| for analogue reposition. That is what makes that
| interesting.
| sedatk wrote:
| "Most probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a
| professional typist..."
|
| This was already mentioned in the article:
|
| "How did he (or some typist) manage to..."
| smitty1e wrote:
| Or possibly multiple typesetters, as the disparate "4"
| versions may imply.
| slim wrote:
| Or a professional typesetter who had multiple typewriters
| with different complementary functions
| sparc24 wrote:
| [flagged]
| rob74 wrote:
| The sticking point here is that later revisions look almost
| identical to the earlier ones, while at the same time the
| corrections look too good to have been produced by the then-
| common "white-out / replace / Xerox" method (page 5). So they
| might have been retyped, and since doing that using a typist
| would have been prohibitively expensive, it _might_ have been
| done using a computer - however the authors haven 't found any
| evidence pointing to that, so they avoid stating it clearly...
| weinzierl wrote:
| > _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 it down in shorthand to type it
| cleanly later.
|
| I think the role of the secretary at that time is immensely
| undervalued. Not only had they be good in shorthand and typing
| but they also served as a kind of editor to check the
| manuscript for spelling and grammar errors.
|
| Also, for everyone used to that system the introduction of the
| computer and the burden to type yourself was considered a step
| back.
| rob74 wrote:
| > _everyone in a position like Ritchie 's had a personal
| secretary_
|
| 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.
| swamp40 wrote:
| > 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 transparent paper. With three different pieces of
| parchment paper, you can get three different repeatable levels
| (regular, subscript, superscript) fairly easily - you just run
| the paper thru 3 times. Align it, then pull the parchment paper
| out.
|
| You can do the same thing vertically so you get nice repeatable
| grids.
|
| It's a lot of work, but not a "mystery".
| zellyn wrote:
| I too was wondering about multiple prints. Seems hard to
| imagine there not being any noticeable variations though.
| Maursault wrote:
| > 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.
| ManiAbod wrote:
| [dead]
| analog31 wrote:
| 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.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| 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 to correct what I'm
| typing as I go (~75 wpm), but 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.
| jacobmartin wrote:
| > 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!
| cperciva wrote:
| In the late 60s, my mother typed my father's thesis -- because
| she knew how to touch type and he didn't.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| 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 years, learned lots about
| music and stage performance, earned an academic letter. Fast
| forward 40 years, and I'm still typing 100wpm and using it
| professionally, for personal business and recreation. Thanks
| Mom! Thanks, Smith-Corona!
| deltarholamda wrote:
| 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.
| thewebcount wrote:
| 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 was clear from the content that I wrote them myself,
| so eventually they accepted it. Here I was trying to make
| things nicer and they just couldn't believe it!
| elzbardico wrote:
| Lay people usually think computers are capable of more
| stuff than what the machines can actually do. I wouldn't
| put past your teachers to think that the computers at
| that time could be capable of doing stuff a la ChatGPT,
| given the prevalence of SciFi movies overhyping computer
| capabilities.
| euroderf wrote:
| Same here - my mom insisted I take a touch typing course.
| Excellent advice!!
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Yes! In the summer of 1973, between my 3rd and 4th years
| of med school (UCLA), I took a basic touch typing class
| at Sawyer Business College. I was the only male among
| about 25 people. I got up to about 30wpm which has stood
| me in good stead in the decades since. One of the best
| things I ever did in terms of yield on investment.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Same here! But I got up to 70 :0
| tromp wrote:
| 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 Y X =
| X + 1 END
|
| Btw, this example shows the entire repertoire of instructions
| available in LOOP, namely set to 0, increment, sequential
| composition, and looping. The method of obtaining a predecessor
| function TMP = 0 LOOP X Y =
| TMP TMP = TMP + 1 END
|
| reminds me of a similar solution for the Church numerals in
| lambda calculus [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOOP_(programming_language)
|
| [2]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding#Derivation_of_...
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| You can get a quick look, visually, here:
| https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/dmr/
|
| Crazy for 1968. I guess he and Donald Knuth will have a lot to
| talk about in the after life!
| ggm wrote:
| 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 exposed.
|
| If you can control the phototypesetter, you can print at higher
| quality than you can type.
| sargstuff wrote:
| Print runs were literally from paper rolling off the set
| presses.
| iJohnDoe wrote:
| Maybe a time traveler.
|
| Remember, there were people scraping the Internet looking for
| things that were posted that might indicate someone was a time
| traveler?
|
| Maybe Dennis Ritchie was given some advanced information and
| given access to advanced technology (US security service that
| someone else mentioned)?
|
| Something fun to think about.
| philistine wrote:
| You've got a time traveling machine, and you give someone XeTeX
| of all things! That's a cruel joke.
| MengerSponge wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTc_j6sqkxA
| dshpala wrote:
| This is one of those cases where I can't help myself but ask: Why
| couldn't you find more worthwhile thing to do?
| throwwwaway69 wrote:
| 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
| tobr wrote:
| Larger samples with grids overlayed are available at
| https://dmrthesis.net/dmr-thesis/
| dmcq2 wrote:
| Reading it the obvious way I'd have done the job at the time
| would be to do two or even four prints on each page selecting
| which chracers fell on that gride each time. The thesis would be
| written using LISP to do the formatting. This would also only
| print those characters that fell on the current alignment. It
| would be a bit fiddly making the 1/24 inch alignments of the
| pages and I'm sure there would have been plenty of mistakes! But
| it is straightforwardly doable with the tools he had. Very
| impressive though. If he did have a LISP program like that I'd
| have expect him to have developed it further or make some mention
| of it.
| welder wrote:
| The actual PhD thesis[pdf], the topic of discussion:
|
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
|
| Found here [0] with two copies archived:
|
| * Dennis Ritchie's personal copy [1]
|
| * Albert Meyer's copy [2]
|
| [0] https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-
| ritchies...
|
| [1]
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10278497...
|
| [2]
| https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10279097...
| stevenjgarner wrote:
| During my undergraduate study of physics at Otago University in
| New Zealand in the 1970's it became pretty apparent that typing
| would become central to computing, so I took the Pitman speed
| typing class and got certified.
|
| As a certified Pitman typist from that era, I can say that
| there is nothing inconsistent to me about this document being
| typed on a typewriter.
|
| It was also common practice to use Letraset to add any
| characteristics to the page not otherwise available on the
| typewriter [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letraset
| ghaff wrote:
| I was actually trying to remember exactly how I did my
| Master's thesis in 1981. The output was printers with daisy
| wheels connected to a Honeywell mainframe. I'm pretty sure I
| must have been able to do superscripts directly. But I may
| have used Letraset for the Greek letters.
| sideproject wrote:
| What a fascinating story!
| MKRhere wrote:
| exit
| daneel_w wrote:
| I think he just used a common all-mechanical typewriter. Every
| typewriter I used as a kid had a fractional form-feed of at least
| two steps (half a line), and some of them had horizontal rulers
| and even tabs on the carriage so you could accurately return it
| to any position you wanted. I loved drawing things with them by
| just moving the carriage around and re-aiming the typing
| aperture.
| RosanaAnaDana wrote:
| I want to know about the interface of the typewriter/ printer he
| was working off of. Also what kinds of stencil guides were
| available at the time. My hot take after reading it: Did he have
| some way of 'setting' the stencils directly onto the printer in a
| very controlled way and the ability to 'pause' printing?
|
| IE, prints prints prints, pause, some stencil required, put in
| stencil into controlled space, make mark, remove stencil, press
| space bar, prints prints prints prints...
|
| It might also explain the '+' issues. It might have been a very
| small stencil and less well fit into a stencil guide.
| tniemi wrote:
| 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.
| vt240 wrote:
| "For some years afterwards, there was a student agency that
| would "roff" documents for students for a modest fee. Roff was
| thus the first program I ever wrote that was used by other
| people in any significant way."
|
| That's the best part of the story!
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Looking 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
| preformatter that sorts all of this into microspaced lines. Print
| the stuff at each height in one pass, go down a microstep, print
| the next and so on. He did have a Selectric-type machine
| available driven by a computer in his basement after all.
|
| What do you do with a grotty one-off hack once it's done its job?
| Bury it. Don't mention it in a workplace full of geniuses who
| would write something like "troff" just to make a point.
| Especially because they did do that only a few years later.
| Doesn't solve the mystery of why he didn't bother to go through
| with the PhD of course.
| civilized wrote:
| I'm thinking of him as a prefigurative example of the now-
| cliche 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.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| 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.
| civilized wrote:
| 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.
| dm319 wrote:
| 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.
| dmcq2 wrote:
| I wonder if there are more examples of extra spacing in the
| thesis after correction. It may be evidence the thesis was done
| on punched cards which were duplicated and corrected. I produced
| a simple program with no maths only a couple of years later that
| made up a contents list and attempted spacing the words to get
| even lines and stop having just a single line of a paragraph on a
| page and a few things like that but, the output was to a
| lineprinter so I never thought of doing anything fancy. It did
| its own spacing so it wouldn't suffer that problem except where
| the spacing for a section was explicit. The contents list was
| printed at the end and you moved it to the beginnng yourself :-)
| I would guess a lot of people did that sort of thing then.
| sedatk wrote:
| "The braces are not perfect-- clearly they have been done by hand
| --but they are very precise"
|
| There were plastic template stencils/rulers that let you draw
| great looking braces.
| mrweasel wrote:
| The whole thing is probably done by hand and Ritchie just had
| excellent handwriting.
| jhncls wrote:
| It would be hard to beat Edger Dijkstra's handwriting. See
| e.g. the one numbered 831, where he explains the naturalness
| of zero-indexing [0].
|
| [0]: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
| workmandan wrote:
| What a joy to parse!
| jgilias wrote:
| It's...
|
| I have horrible handwriting that I've never been ashamed
| of. Now I am.
|
| Thanks for posting this!
| carabiner wrote:
| Draftsmen used to practice freehand lettering. The end result,
| without stencils, looked indistinguishable from print.
| segfaultbuserr wrote:
| Possible. These kinds of templates were the standard tool for
| drawing engineering schematic symbols (like transistors or
| logic gates) before CAD.
| makach wrote:
| What a fantastic rabbit hole to fall into..!
| jleyank wrote:
| Well, given a pdp-11, runoff, a tulip-wheel printer, a 300-
| (maybe 1200, forget) baud modem and a pile of 25% rag
| dissertation paper you too can create a dissertation. Sorta
| tedious but it worked.
| DougMerritt wrote:
| What is a "tulip-wheel printer"? I get no search results. If
| you meant "daisy-wheel printer", wikipedia says that was 1970
| and later. [1]
|
| Just as general interest, not because I have reason to think it
| was used for his thesis, the "Friden Flexowriter" was quite
| heavily used with computers back then, including at MIT (don't
| know about Harvard), and it had many models -- one of which,
| interestingly enough, supported justification, the
| "Justowriter". [2]
|
| It was mentioned in Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines.
| [3]
|
| P.S. the poor guy might even have had to suffer with 110 baud,
| which was not uncommon back then -- and was slower than reading
| speed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines
| squokko wrote:
| "Tulip wheel" is hilarious because a print wheel looks a lot
| like a daisy and nothing like a tulip.
| jleyank wrote:
| 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 earlier when I was writing up, not
| when I had money.
| kps wrote:
| '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...
| jleyank wrote:
| Spinwriter was sticking in my mind, and the computer
| museum came to my rescue:
| https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-
| output/14/3...
|
| Whomever called it tulip didn't know flower shapes
| either. I'm a hacker not a botanist :-).
| squokko wrote:
| Wow, amazing. There was a daisy wheel and a tulip wheel
| and they were different technologies. Apologies to GP
| postultimate wrote:
| Among all the fuss about typography, the authors have overlooked
| the most important detail about the PHD thesis, which was that
| Dennis Ritchie was the inventor of Brainfuck.
| userbinator wrote:
| _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.)
| cornholio wrote:
| The thesis has even finer horizontal spacing, creating a
| perfect centering effect of variable width line numbers, while
| the rest text on the same line is grid aligned. It's not
| something you do with a typewriter, unless you are a computer
| science PhD.
| sargstuff wrote:
| For the selectric typewriter, the horizontal spacing can be
| manipulated by swapping between different typewriter golf
| balls.
|
| Pre-computer age summer high school project utilized
| different selectric golf ball fonts & spacing to make use of
| the golf font characteristics to create text pictures/art
| (font kerning & spacing). The high schoolers that
| participated in the project were not university admits yet.
|
| The ultimate thesis hack, automated web page search &
| comparison to find selectric golf balls that match the thesis
| paper font/type/kerning.
| jseutter wrote:
| Similarly the authors talk about how the multiline brackets
| were hand-drawn, and how could they be that precise? They might
| now know how common engineering stencils were for such things.
| Just find the bracket of the right size, and trace it onto the
| page.
| qart wrote:
| 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.
| scrame wrote:
| Yeah, Kernighan is the K in K&R as in the other author of
| "The C Programming Language" as well as the "K" in awk, he's
| not just some dude speculating.
| [deleted]
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| And the third one is his younger brother.
| canadianfella wrote:
| [dead]
| suprjami wrote:
| 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
| cmdrriker wrote:
| IMHO, he's the David Attenborough of Computer History.
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _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)
| benj111 wrote:
| >once you get used to computers it's hard to remember....
|
| True, but there's a big clue in the name.
| fsckboy wrote:
| 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.
| benj111 wrote:
| 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
| rob74 wrote:
| ...and then you had to use something like this
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipp-Ex to "delete" a mistyped
| letter by typing it again in white, and then correct the
| error.
| leokennis wrote:
| It moved you back, one space.
| fsckboy wrote:
| I'm talking about a mechanical typewriter, not an electric,
| what where you, rich? :)
|
| backspace moved you back smoothly as you pressed harder and
| harder till you let go of it and it encountered the little
| ratchet thing and stuck there, one space back.
|
| during the transition of smoothly moving back toward the
| ratchet, you could type another character anywhere on the
| way, and to catch the ratchet it actually had to move you
| back beyond one space.
| pyentropy wrote:
| > 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.
| userbinator wrote:
| _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.
| kps wrote:
| 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...
| kps wrote:
| 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.
| K0balt wrote:
| 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 tools, and Ritchie's accuracy, although more than
| sufficient, is unremarkable for someone adept with those tools.
|
| In the analog world, the mechanical and repetitive default
| spacing of the typewriter was the intrusion, not the ontological
| rule.
|
| The re-production of the document in its various iterations is
| remarkable, but consistent with using a layout table (written
| notes of calculated alignments). It was a common method used to
| calculate the original spacing for awkward or critical text. You
| couldn't just type something and then move it, so you would work
| it out ahead of time before typing. If you were smart or
| experienced you would note these calculations as a list of
| alignments so you could reuse them when you inevitably had to
| start over. There is no reason to suspect that these alignment
| notes would not have been reused and iterated upon.
|
| He might easily have done this himself, and certainly would not
| have found it difficult to find someone with the skills to do so.
| The fact that most people didn't bother speaks more to the
| perceived importance of doing so rather than the physical
| capability to produce the work artfully using common tools.
|
| He either considered it important to do it somewhat artfully or
| someone helping him did. It's no more complex than that.
| lelandfe wrote:
| Not for nothing, but your dismissal here is tantamount to
| refuting the core thrust of this paper:
|
| > _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._
| LudwigNagasena wrote:
| OP didn't say "trivial". They said "unremarkable for someone
| adept with those tools" and "most people didn't bother".
| lelandfe wrote:
| We are lucky I did not claim they said "trivial," then,
| hey? But sure. That's still exactly opposite the paper's
| claim. They couldn't find another paper exhibiting those
| qualities, which they should have were it unremarkable.
| Maursault wrote:
| > 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.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Maybe he modified a typewriter to allow manual control and
| precision, probably specifically changes focused towards his
| goals. A typewriter would have been easily available, access
| to tools would have been easy considering the prestigious
| university he was part of and finally, he definitely had the
| brain power to do something like that. E.g. maybe he had
| multiple Selectric balls made to allow
| superscript/subscripts/symbols and changed them to accomplish
| different "levels" of a line.
| fungalinfection wrote:
| Never heard of the guy. What's so interesting about some crappy
| old thesis from the 1960s that didn't even get published? Sounds
| like these people, whoever they are, would have their time better
| spent looking at more important things like, making AIs run
| faster or letting you program them in JavaScript or something.
| teleforce wrote:
| The paper posed three questions but only cater for the last one
| i.e. on the how was the thesis prepared?
|
| It'd be very interesting to see further research on the very
| first question regarding the contributions elements of the thesis
| due to the overwhelming popularity of the C programming languages
| that most of the popular modern programming languages are based
| upon it including C++, Matlab, Java, Python, Ruby, C#, D, Go,
| Swift, Rust and even the latest proposed TenetLang programming
| language by GPT-4 [1].
|
| [1]GPT-4 Designed a Programming Language:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177857
| nohuck13 wrote:
| >This strange set of circumstances raises at least three broad
| questions ...
|
| >- Why wasn't the degree granted?"
|
| According to [1]
|
| "in 1968, he defended his PhD thesis on "Computational Complexity
| and Program Structure" at Harvard under the supervision of
| Patrick C. Fischer. However, Ritchie never officially received
| his PhD degree as he did not submit a bound copy of his
| dissertation to the Harvard library, a requirement for the
| degree."
|
| So he had bigger and better things to do than mere filing.
| Plausible!
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#:~:text=Howev....
| killingtime74 wrote:
| There's lazy then there's this....
| HeckFeck wrote:
| Absolutely not surprising for a Unix father.
| derbOac wrote:
| I thought the article was interesting and worthwhile, but also
| was disappointed there wasn't more discussion about the context
| you're pointing out. I don't know anything about it outside of
| what's stated in the article, but it seems based on what was
| written there was enough uncertainty about the context
| surrounding the document to raise questions about the
| authenticity of the story or the document itself.
|
| To me, the article seemed to strongly imply -- although not
| explicitly state -- that the document was created post hoc to
| fit the story rather than being genuinely completed at the time
| of his degree program. They proceed as if the mystery is in how
| he created the document at the time, rather than to question
| whether it was created at the time, even though that seems to
| be an obvious question to raise.
|
| To be clear, I don't mean to suggest Ritchie did fabricate
| anything -- to me the thesis (links to which have posted by
| someone in this thread) looks very similar to other
| mathematical documents from that time. But the article is
| written in this way that seems strange to me, in that they
| focus on assumed typesetting anomalies rather than all of the
| assumptions themselves.
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