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

477 points by tkhattra 4y ago

sargstuff 4y ago
The DR. Jupiter hypothesis: 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.... [0] : https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/selectric/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/selectric... [1] : https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-complete-quest-to-build-spherical-cubes-20230210/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-complete-quest...
cup 4y ago
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.
- ggm 4y ago
  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.
- ChickeNES 4y ago
  What's the source of that? It's not mentioned on his Wikipedia page and Google was next to useless trying to find anything.
coliveira 4y ago
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.
- sedatk 4y ago
  "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 4y ago
    Or possibly multiple typesetters, as the disparate "4" versions may imply.
    - slim 4y ago
      Or a professional typesetter who had multiple typewriters with different complementary functions
- sparc24 4y ago
  [flagged]
- laserbeam 4y ago
  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 4y ago
sideproject 4y ago
What a fascinating story!
- MKRhere 4y ago
  exit
sedatk 4y ago
"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.
- segfaultbuserr 4y ago
  Possible. These kinds of templates were the standard tool for drawing engineering schematic symbols (like transistors or logic gates) before CAD.
- mrweasel 4y ago
  The whole thing is probably done by hand and Ritchie just had excellent handwriting.
  - jhncls 4y ago
    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 https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
    - workmandan 4y ago
      What a joy to parse!
    - jgilias 4y ago
      It’s… I have horrible handwriting that I’ve never been ashamed of. Now I am. Thanks for posting this!
- carabiner 4y ago
  Draftsmen used to practice freehand lettering. The end result, without stencils, looked indistinguishable from print.
jleyank 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines
  - squokko 4y ago
    "Tulip wheel" is hilarious because a print wheel looks a lot like a daisy and nothing like a tulip.
    - jleyank 4y ago
      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.
      - 4y ago
jefftk 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  Sure, but why leave the extra space there after retyping it? Still possible though.
  - jefftk 4y ago
    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.
raphlinus 4y ago
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 http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html [2]: https://thefontdetective.com/ https://thefontdetective.com/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- codezero 4y ago
  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.
iJohnDoe 4y ago
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 4y ago
  You've got a time traveling machine, and you give someone XeTeX of all things! That's a cruel joke.
  - MengerSponge 4y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTc_j6sqkxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTc_j6sqkxA
userbinator 4y ago
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.)
- jseutter 4y ago
  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.
- cornholio 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
- qart 4y ago
  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.
fxtentacle 4y ago
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.
Animats 4y ago
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/cnthesis/selectric.htm https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter
- analog31 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
analog31 4y ago
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.
- cperciva 4y ago
  In the late 60s, my mother typed my father's thesis -- because she knew how to touch type and he didn't.
  - NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
    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!
    - euroderf 4y ago
      Same here - my mom insisted I take a touch typing course. Excellent advice!!
      - bookofjoe 4y ago
        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.
ggm 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Print runs were literally from paper rolling off the set presses.
welder 4y ago
The actual PhD thesis[pdf], the topic of discussion: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2020/05/102790971/Ritchie_dissertation.pdf 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-lost-dissertation/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies... [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102784979 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10278497... [2] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102790971 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10279097...
- stevenjgarner 4y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letraset
  - ghaff 4y ago
    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.
teleforce 4y ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177857
tobr 4y ago
Larger samples with grids overlayed are available at https://dmrthesis.net/dmr-thesis/ https://dmrthesis.net/dmr-thesis/
makach 4y ago
What a fantastic rabbit hole to fall into..!
ManiAbod 4y ago
[dead]
postultimate 4y ago
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.
nohuck13 4y ago
>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=However%2C%20Ritchie%20never%20officially%20received,a%20requirement%20for%20the%20degree https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#:~:text=Howev....
- killingtime74 4y ago
  There's lazy then there's this....
- HeckFeck 4y ago
  Absolutely not surprising for a Unix father.
- derbOac 4y ago
  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.
AlphaGeekZulu 4y ago
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.
- ricksunny 4y ago
  >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 4y ago
    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?
tromp 4y ago
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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOOP_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding#Derivation_of_predecessor_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding#Derivation_of_...
- anthk 4y ago
  You are basically describing LISP...
throwaway2037 4y ago
You can get a quick look, visually, here: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/dmr/ 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!
meganlawson 4y ago
Oh I haven't seen or read that yet.
dmcq2 4y ago
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.
K0balt 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
fungalinfection 4y ago
[flagged]
daneel_w 4y ago
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.
MarkusWandel 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - MarkusWandel 4y ago
    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 4y ago
robertlagrant 4y ago
Huh. I had David Brailsford for CS in 2001.
tniemi 4y ago
Mentioned here: UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-History-and-a-Memoir_RuLit_Me_616356.pdf 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.
- scoopertrooper 4y ago
  You can still use it today! https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/ https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/
  - baruchel 4y ago
    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.
- vt240 4y ago
  "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!
dmcq2 4y ago
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.
swamp40 4y ago
> 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 4y ago
  I too was wondering about multiple prints. Seems hard to imagine there not being any noticeable variations though.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > 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.
dshpala 4y ago
This is one of those cases where I can't help myself but ask: Why couldn't you find more worthwhile thing to do?
RosanaAnaDana 4y ago
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.
throwwwaway69 4y ago
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
pvaldes 4y ago
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.
musicale 4y ago
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.
_nalply 4y ago
I saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82TxNejKsng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82TxNejKsng. 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.

477 points by tkhattra 4y ago

The DR. Jupiter hypothesis: 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.... [0] : https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/selectric/ https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/selectric... [1] : https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-complete-quest-to-build-spherical-cubes-20230210/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-complete-quest...

cup 4y ago

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.

ggm 4y ago
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.
ChickeNES 4y ago
What's the source of that? It's not mentioned on his Wikipedia page and Google was next to useless trying to find anything.

coliveira 4y ago

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.

sedatk 4y ago
"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 4y ago
  Or possibly multiple typesetters, as the disparate "4" versions may imply.
  - slim 4y ago
    Or a professional typesetter who had multiple typewriters with different complementary functions
sparc24 4y ago
[flagged]
laserbeam 4y ago
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 4y ago

sideproject 4y ago

What a fascinating story!

MKRhere 4y ago
exit

sedatk 4y ago

"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.

segfaultbuserr 4y ago
Possible. These kinds of templates were the standard tool for drawing engineering schematic symbols (like transistors or logic gates) before CAD.
mrweasel 4y ago
The whole thing is probably done by hand and Ritchie just had excellent handwriting.
- jhncls 4y ago
  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 https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF
  - workmandan 4y ago
    What a joy to parse!
  - jgilias 4y ago
    It’s… I have horrible handwriting that I’ve never been ashamed of. Now I am. Thanks for posting this!
carabiner 4y ago
Draftsmen used to practice freehand lettering. The end result, without stencils, looked indistinguishable from print.

jleyank 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines
- squokko 4y ago
  "Tulip wheel" is hilarious because a print wheel looks a lot like a daisy and nothing like a tulip.
  - jleyank 4y ago
    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.
    - 4y ago

jefftk 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
Sure, but why leave the extra space there after retyping it? Still possible though.
- jefftk 4y ago
  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.

raphlinus 4y ago

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 http://luc.devroye.org/fonts-44934.html [2]: https://thefontdetective.com/ https://thefontdetective.com/

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
codezero 4y ago
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.

iJohnDoe 4y ago

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 4y ago
You've got a time traveling machine, and you give someone XeTeX of all things! That's a cruel joke.
- MengerSponge 4y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTc_j6sqkxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTc_j6sqkxA

userbinator 4y ago

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.)

jseutter 4y ago
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.
cornholio 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
qart 4y ago
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.

fxtentacle 4y ago

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.

Animats 4y ago

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/cnthesis/selectric.htm https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/texas/apple... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

analog31 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.
  - Gigachad 4y ago

analog31 4y ago

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.

cperciva 4y ago
In the late 60s, my mother typed my father's thesis -- because she knew how to touch type and he didn't.
- NoZebra120vClip 4y ago
  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!
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Same here - my mom insisted I take a touch typing course. Excellent advice!!
    - bookofjoe 4y ago
      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.

ggm 4y ago

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 4y ago
Print runs were literally from paper rolling off the set presses.

welder 4y ago

The actual PhD thesis[pdf], the topic of discussion: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2020/05/102790971/Ritchie_dissertation.pdf 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-lost-dissertation/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies... [1] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102784979 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10278497... [2] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102790971 https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10279097...

stevenjgarner 4y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letraset
- ghaff 4y ago
  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.

teleforce 4y ago

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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35177857

tobr 4y ago

Larger samples with grids overlayed are available at https://dmrthesis.net/dmr-thesis/ https://dmrthesis.net/dmr-thesis/

makach 4y ago

What a fantastic rabbit hole to fall into..!

ManiAbod 4y ago

[dead]

postultimate 4y ago

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.

nohuck13 4y ago

>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=However%2C%20Ritchie%20never%20officially%20received,a%20requirement%20for%20the%20degree https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#:~:text=Howev....

killingtime74 4y ago
There's lazy then there's this....
HeckFeck 4y ago
Absolutely not surprising for a Unix father.
derbOac 4y ago
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.

AlphaGeekZulu 4y ago

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.

ricksunny 4y ago
>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 4y ago
  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?

tromp 4y ago

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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOOP_(programming_language) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding#Derivation_of_predecessor_function https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding#Derivation_of_...

anthk 4y ago
You are basically describing LISP...

throwaway2037 4y ago

You can get a quick look, visually, here: https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~bwk/dmr/ 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!

meganlawson 4y ago

Oh I haven't seen or read that yet.

dmcq2 4y ago

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.

K0balt 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.

fungalinfection 4y ago

[flagged]

daneel_w 4y ago

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.

MarkusWandel 4y ago

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 4y ago
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.
- MarkusWandel 4y ago
  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 4y ago

robertlagrant 4y ago

Huh. I had David Brailsford for CS in 2001.

tniemi 4y ago

Mentioned here: UNIX: A History and a Memoir https://www.rulit.me/data/programs/resources/pdf/UNIX-A-History-and-a-Memoir_RuLit_Me_616356.pdf 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.

scoopertrooper 4y ago
You can still use it today! https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/ https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/
- baruchel 4y ago
  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.
vt240 4y ago
"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!

dmcq2 4y ago

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.

swamp40 4y ago

> 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 4y ago
I too was wondering about multiple prints. Seems hard to imagine there not being any noticeable variations though.
Maursault 4y ago
> 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.

dshpala 4y ago

This is one of those cases where I can't help myself but ask: Why couldn't you find more worthwhile thing to do?

RosanaAnaDana 4y ago

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.

throwwwaway69 4y ago

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

pvaldes 4y ago

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.

musicale 4y ago

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.

_nalply 4y ago

I saw this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82TxNejKsng https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82TxNejKsng. 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.