How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) [pdf]
cs.princeton.edu
cs.princeton.edu
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.
That's a very empowering anecdote & story, thank you for sharing it :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
People in small town of course know each other and use word of mouth to find candidates, for example.
What were they supposed to do, put on an advert on the national newspapers for every vacancy in the country?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
That's a fluid thing. We do not have to run it like we do, and I feel we shouldn't.
So no. It is a contrived thing. Can be changed, should be.
However, at this moment it is also what we live with, so know it well, work it best we can.
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.
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 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.
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...
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).
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.
That's the best part of the story!
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.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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.
He has a video about Dennis' thesis here: https://youtu.be/82TxNejKsng
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)
True, but there's a big clue in the name.
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
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 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.
Where? 1/24" is all they mention, which is half the normal 1/12" character spacing.
p11 https://bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/typewriter/selectric/PCE-008-1...
Was there something that would allow for the the fancier horizontal resolution tricks?
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.
This was already mentioned in the article:
"How did he (or some typist) manage to..."
For the use of whiteout, for example, the date claim is much more specific in the article.
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.
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.
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.
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
Found here [0] with two copies archived:
* Dennis Ritchie’s personal copy [1]
* Albert Meyer’s copy [2]
[0] https://computerhistory.org/blog/discovering-dennis-ritchies...
[1] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10278497...
[2] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10279097...
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]
Chemical diagrams, graphs, and equations, were all done by hand.
Theses were shorter.
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!
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.
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!
There were plastic template stencils/rulers that let you draw great looking braces.
I have horrible handwriting that I’ve never been ashamed of. Now I am.
Thanks for posting this!
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 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.
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.
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...
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.
Sure LaTeX is a thing, but to call that user friendly is a nightmare.
Word but as a Selectric emulator would be pretty interesting.
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.
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.
>- Why wasn't the degree granted?"
According to [1]
"in 1968, he defended his PhD thesis on "Computational Complexity and Program Structure" at Harvard under the supervision of Patrick C. Fischer. However, Ritchie never officially received his PhD degree as he did not submit a bound copy of his dissertation to the Harvard library, a requirement for the degree."
So he had bigger and better things to do than mere filing. Plausible!
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#:~:text=Howev....
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.
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
TMP = 0
LOOP X
Y = TMP
TMP = TMP + 1
END
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOOP_(programming_language)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding#Derivation_of_...
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.
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".
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.
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.
Just as general interest, not because I have reason to think it was used for his thesis, the "Friden Flexowriter" was quite heavily used with computers back then, including at MIT (don't know about Harvard), and it had many models -- one of which, interestingly enough, supported justification, the "Justowriter". [2]
It was mentioned in Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines. [3]
P.S. the poor guy might even have had to suffer with 110 baud, which was not uncommon back then -- and was slower than reading speed.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_wheel_printing
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines
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.
https://typewriterdatabase.com/197x-nec-spinwriter-7720.7239...
https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/input-output/14/3...
Whomever called it tulip didn’t know flower shapes either. I’m a hacker not a botanist :-).
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....
[0] : https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/selectric...
[1] : https://www.quantamagazine.org/mathematicians-complete-quest...
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.
Crazy for 1968. I guess he and Donald Knuth will have a lot to talk about in the after life!
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:
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.
Could he have simply retyped the entire page?
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.