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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> probably Dennies Richie sent his manuscript to a professional typist who provided services to the university,

Maybe, but I think everyone in a position like Ritchie's had a personal secretary whose main task was being a professional typist.

>* unless he was adept at spend several hours typing until he got professional results.

Typing was tedious and error prone, that's why people dictated to secretaries who wrote it down in shorthand to type it cleanly later.

I think the role of the secretary at that time is immensely undervalued. Not only had they be good in shorthand and typing but they also served as a kind of editor to check the manuscript for spelling and grammar errors.

Also, for everyone used to that system the introduction of the computer and the burden to type yourself was considered a step back.

> everyone in a position like Ritchie's had a personal secretary

maybe everyone in a position like the one he later had, definitely not while he wrote his PhD thesis... but even then, I don't think researchers at Bell Labs had personal secretaries.

As far as I understand, the author argues the typewriters of the era couldn't do that. I have no knowledge about what typewriters existed back then, but any criticism of that claim should also be specific to the time period and not just typewriters in general. (I find it plausible that typewriters in the 60s had the feature you describe, it's just not clear).

For the use of whiteout, for example, the date claim is much more specific in the article.

Having used a typewriter I can confirm what raphlinus wrote above.

Moreover you would not have to use tabs necessarily. A typewriter is an analogue device with a roller on a sled. It's not that there are fixed character cells like in a computer. When you press a button the roller usually moves a fixed distance but you can suppress that and position the roller freely. You also can position your characters freely in the vertical direction by turning the roller with a knob on its side. Basically characters could be placed on the sheet without restrictions. To get an idea what was possible look up Typewriter Art.

The thing is what all those spacings are quite consistent for analogue reposition. That is what makes that interesting.

Suggesting David Brailsford and Brian Kernighan had this oversight is pretty funny. These are two incredibly well respected computer scientists, Brian Kernighan being one of the main contributers to inventing C and Unix.

Kernighan also wrote Pic, a *roff/*TeX preprocessor. He knows a thing or two about typesetting. And, obviously, he's the 'K' in AWK.

This whole article sounds to me like a prank they made. There are too many things that don't make sense. I wonder if they're making fun of a whole generation that doesn't know how a typewriter works.

The sticking point here is that later revisions look almost identical to the earlier ones, while at the same time the corrections look too good to have been produced by the then-common "white-out / replace / Xerox" method (page 5). So they might have been retyped, and since doing that using a typist would have been prohibitively expensive, it might have been done using a computer - however the authors haven't found any evidence pointing to that, so they avoid stating it clearly...

"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..."

Or possibly multiple typesetters, as the disparate "4" versions may imply.

Or a professional typesetter who had multiple typewriters with different complementary functions

They say they sifted through quite some documents of the era and none boasts such precision and command of the typewriter. Maybe they didn't look enough, but maybe it was not your ordinary typist.

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