4 ms·

TeX was written in the 1970s for typesetting when there were no word processors by a computer programmer who couldn’t afford professional typesetting and couldn

TeX was written in the 1970s for typesetting when there were no word processors by a computer programmer who couldn’t afford professional typesetting and couldn’t be bothered to learn assembly language so he wrote his own fictional one for his book — the same book he wrote TeX to publish.

Forgotthepass8 3y ago
>A Computer Programmer No less than Donald Knuth in fact
svat 3y ago
Good joke :-) This is already very tangential, but just for the benefit of anyone who may miss the humour and take the above comment seriously: - re “couldn't afford professional typesetting”: Knuth was happy when Addison–Wesley approached him, specifically because he liked the high-quality typesetting of their books (like Thomas' Calculus) that he had used as a student. He was happy with the typesetting of the first editions of Vol 1 and 2, and only for the second edition, when the publishers moved from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting (that is, when the quality of the best achievable professional typesetting deteriorated), and he learned of the existence of digital typesetters, that he was motivated to come up with his own solution. - re “couldn't be bothered to learn assembly language” — Knuth was approached by the publisher in the first place, because even as a student he had become a legendary compiler-writer (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7 http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7) in multiple machine/assembly languages. In fact, the fictional “MIX” that he created was literally a “mix” of various then-existent machine languages (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117), some binary, some decimal (https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer / https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf), and MIX was introduced in the book with: > There should be no hesitation about learning a new machine language; indeed, the author has found it not uncommon to be writing programs in a half dozen different machine languages during the same week! Everyone with more than a casual interest in computers will probably get to know several different machine languages…

Forgotthepass8 3y ago

>A Computer Programmer No less than Donald Knuth in fact

svat 3y ago

Good joke :-) This is already very tangential, but just for the benefit of anyone who may miss the humour and take the above comment seriously: - re “couldn't afford professional typesetting”: Knuth was happy when Addison–Wesley approached him, specifically because he liked the high-quality typesetting of their books (like Thomas' Calculus) that he had used as a student. He was happy with the typesetting of the first editions of Vol 1 and 2, and only for the second edition, when the publishers moved from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting (that is, when the quality of the best achievable professional typesetting deteriorated), and he learned of the existence of digital typesetters, that he was motivated to come up with his own solution. - re “couldn't be bothered to learn assembly language” — Knuth was approached by the publisher in the first place, because even as a student he had become a legendary compiler-writer (http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7 http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7) in multiple machine/assembly languages. In fact, the fictional “MIX” that he created was literally a “mix” of various then-existent machine languages (https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/18117), some binary, some decimal (https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer https://catonmat.net/donald-knuths-first-computer / https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf https://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf), and MIX was introduced in the book with: > There should be no hesitation about learning a new machine language; indeed, the author has found it not uncommon to be writing programs in a half dozen different machine languages during the same week! Everyone with more than a casual interest in computers will probably get to know several different machine languages…