3 ms·

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 impro

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
    Yeah, my imagined likely scenario involves that too. Maybe stuff at Bell Labs was really picking up and he's trying to finish the thesis, but it still has a few minor typos. He can't abide knowing about these and turning it in, but even with his formidable diligence, he can't stomach reprinting the whole damn thing and thoroughly reviewing it for the 27th time. I completed a very interesting postdoc to start a new job, and even then, it took me a couple years to tie up loose ends and give them the finished deliverables I felt I owed them.
  - dm319 4y ago
    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.
    - civilized 4y ago
      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.
      - dm319 4y ago
        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.

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
  Yeah, my imagined likely scenario involves that too. Maybe stuff at Bell Labs was really picking up and he's trying to finish the thesis, but it still has a few minor typos. He can't abide knowing about these and turning it in, but even with his formidable diligence, he can't stomach reprinting the whole damn thing and thoroughly reviewing it for the 27th time. I completed a very interesting postdoc to start a new job, and even then, it took me a couple years to tie up loose ends and give them the finished deliverables I felt I owed them.
- dm319 4y ago
  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.
  - civilized 4y ago
    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.
    - dm319 4y ago
      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.