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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I said:
> I do not think one should reject any social privileges one has
to which you replied:
> Putting barriers up to prevent this sort of thing
If you reread my comment, you may find, that I mentioned explicetly, not to put barriers on "this sort of thing" but instead respecting the fact, that some people just have no chance to enter a group, without the group taking additional steps in finding them.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
> 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.
> 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.
I don't understand the comment at all, it has nothing to do with nepotism or favoritsm....like at all?
The situation would be different if the typesetter would also be grading the work. Also, an apprentice is not one of the "well-connected successful friends" for most people.
You seem to argue that the taking the opportunity is wrong because others do not have it, by definition since it's a personal, not work-related connection. It could not have been accessed by the others since it's not a generally available opportunity. But you seem to forget that in the end it's really not about producing the most equal thesis but the best possible. It's not a standardised test but a first try at creating meaningful insights. Comparing it with others is important for the grade but that's not what it's about. It could also be ungraded. It's about the work itself. Taking the opportunity is right.
> The anecdote reinforces the now dominant view that networking is everything
this is not even a logical conclusion. The thesis is not about being good very good typeset. You have to write it first.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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).
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.
"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."
I still use Troff as my daily typesetting tool. But I don't use Groff which doesn't handle utf-8 and is rather bad for accurate formatting. I use the less known Heirloom Troff, which is very good.
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.
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.
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.
These days LaTeX seems like an obvious choice for a thesis, yet lots of people still use Microsoft Word. It doesn't seem too suspicious that if it was several orders of magnitude harder to use LaTeX then almost nobody, except a handful or even one of the most dedicated people would use it.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some other comments¹ have said that some Selectrics had a half-space control, so that would provide 1/24″ horizontally. I think that's the finest in the paper, unless I've missed a case.
> 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)
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 :)
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
Suggesting David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan had this oversight is pretty funny. These are two incredibly well respected computer scientists, Brian Kernighan being one of the main contributers to inventing C and Unix.
This whole article sounds to me like a prank they made. There are too many things that don't make sense. I wonder if they're making fun of a whole generation that doesn't know how a typewriter works.
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...
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.
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]
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.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
I'm thinking of him as a prefigurative example of the now-cliché college dropout startup founder. He was ready to build the future and had grown terribly bored of this giant pile of sterile math about Turing machines. It felt like a ball and chain, not an accomplishment. Being asked to pay to get it bound was the straw that broke the camel's back.
Or simply procrastination. If there's no hard deadline and there are more interesting things to do, keep putting it off until it would be embarrassing to bring it up again. And then never mention it again. Who, after all, is proud of, say, an email kept "unread" for 4 months because you really should get to it, and then quietly toggled to "read" because that's now the prudent thing to do (as opposed to following up on it that late). In that context, it also makes sense not to correct anyone referring to you as "Dr. So-and-so". "No, I don't have a PhD... why not... oh because..." never mind. Just let the sleeping dog lie.
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.
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.
The strange thing is that he is reported to have submitted a copy and gotten thesis committee approval, so it should have been just a matter of getting it bound and filed in the library. But mysteriously he didn't take this last seemingly trivial step.
That seems strange, odd to throw out all away at that stage, when all the work has already been done and the expense of typesetting it has already been paid. Getting it bound is relatively less, unless they wanted more than one copy.
Maybe he disagreed with the corrections? Or maybe he had run out of money to correct minors? Maybe the reviewers were critical and he was annoyed by that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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!
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.
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.
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].
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's fascinating to me is that it appears that he fulfilled the scholarly requirements for a doctorate (including completing a dissertation that his committee signed off on) but didn't fully complete the bureaucratic/administrative requirements. The proposed explanation is that he already had a job, was busy with other things, and didn't really care.
If this is the case, then unless Ritchie really didn't want the Ph.D. (or was trying to make some kind of statement) it seems to me that his advisor kind of dropped the ball by not getting his student a bit of administrative help to actually receive the degree.
FOURier analysis of the Poisson distribution of DR's thesis
hints at the possibility that had Bob Bemer[0] been able to golf ASCII,
DR might have joined the selectra golf club and forgone the unix/multics debate. aka made full use of the Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter (MT/ST) model.
if "Mathematicians Complete Quest to Build ‘Spherical Cubes’"[1] had just been available to Bob Bemer....
Something more sinister is alluded to. Especially that the faculty will never reward a degree to Richie. The video doesn't give a definitive explanation, however.
But let me give a very wild speculation: Someone suspected plagiarism or just something to be off. That person might have seen a draft copy and thought to himself, this can't be right. They started an investigation. And Ritchie, being a young man really did something bad, perhaps "lending" something. It might be even something not directly related to the thesis. Ritchie was caught red-handed and the punishment was threatening to reject the thesis. Being told this Ritchie didn't submit the thesis. Because shame was involved he never talked about it.
Sorry to be such a downer. If this is true, this would be a very sad story of injustice. Perhaps the dean (or similar) was just too strict and powerful and hated Ritchie. The punishment was too severe. Now both are dead and took their stories to the grave. At least, Ritchie had a successful career anyway, and for that I am happy.
It's only a speculation based on the video I saw. Caveat emptor.
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.
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].
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I wonder how much would be an estimate for the cost for the University in terms of image and networking, of not allowing Dennis Richie to read their PhD there because a fee.
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.