Dennis Ritchie’s page on Bell Labs website
bell-labs.com
bell-labs.com
Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect.
Fortunately there's reader mode.
Simple fast, and, as you say, you can use reader mode.
Some people have blogs like this arguing that the user should have the power to customize his experience, for example, using a custom CSS. So they deliver plain html, with a very basic CSS sheet.
It's HTML where the whole point is to reflow to fit your window. YOU determine the page width and the content reflows to fit.
The problem was when it took off and a bunch of publishers and print people came along and demanded control over the layout. Now they even have custom fonts FFS.
I'm sure it was done for a reason - popularity, A/B testing, money, an IMHO misguided sense of aesthetics - but personally, I definitely never asked for the "design"-ization of the web.
If you opt in, a simple page like this ends up looking pretty modern anyway, but plain, while if you opt out, your site is often rendered as if made for an older desktop monitor, like this one.
Another way of putting the problem, we preserved old desktop styles rather than invent new default responsive styles for touch-based browsers.
Without a standard like grey backgrounds and blue links to fall back on, websites had to start making decisions, especially when sites go responsive. At that point it is easier to invent new styles… there aren’t that many useful defaults to fall back on.
This is particularly true for HTML5 form controls, which rarely look good in any browser without styling…
But perhaps there’s hope for the future as new design language becomes HTML tags. E.g. details has an arrow, datalist builds a native autocomplete, and so on. It’s a shame that dialog doesn’t have native formatting tho, or that the idea of creating new, modern default styles hasn’t caught on yet in a cross-browser way.
But like you say, not a really big deal. There's always reader mode, or local CSS overrides.
Yes, this. Given my older eyesight, having reader mode set to an easily legible larger size makes lots of simple web pages much more readable for me.
However, with reader mode it goes straight to my preferred font size, has nice margins, and basically everything is formatted in a very readable way. It still reflows and changes width with the window, but the rest of the formatting is better as well. I really hate text that goes right to the edges of the windows with no margins. Just a personal preference, but for me the quickest path to dramatically improved readability on some sites is reader mode.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.bell...
Wow, absolutely unheard of now. I’ll have to read a few of his papers now.
This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder how many of Richie’s accomplishments were due to Bell and what could he have done outside of Bell on his own path? I’m thinking that living in an attic while accomplishing great CS feats is a delicate balance that might have only happened at Bell with his parents support. But is there another timeline where he sees the weaknesses at Bell and ends up somewhere else in Silicon Valley?
But, the company fully expected to lose people to MIT, Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, and other places. It was a point of pride that they could recruit young people of that caliber. Those who did choose to go usually left on good terms with Bell donating lab equipment and staying in touch for access to future students and postdocs.
Source: Physical sciences postdoc in the early 1990s before it went over the cliff and before SV became what it is today
The way our current "Work Culture" is setup, it is destroying people's lives.
The permanent members of technical staff in the physical sciences were under tremendous pressure to be both world-leading scientists while somehow being applied enough to help AT&T long distance fight off MCI and other competitors who had no R&D arms. There was no guidance on how to do this except "Well, work harder."
I will always be grateful to them for shielding me and the other postdocs from all the turmoil. It would have been very easy for them to say, "You're on your own" and look out for themselves but they always made time to talk to us and give us whatever support we needed. Needless to say, I miss that spirit.
It's fascinating to see how many modern distinguished researchers were fostered and mentored in their early lives through a familial & supportive environment which contributed in their path toward innovation; such a unique privilege shared by a diminishing cadre that were lucky enough to grow up in that vanishing analog world of black ties and a lifelong devotion to your research and work.
That reminds me of web assembly and WASI.
So this is tangential but how is the component stuff in web assembly doing? It seemed like such a great idea to me but apparently, at least at one point, was somehow controversial or political.
Also, I wonder if it would be possible to port Inferno to web assembly.
You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.
It supposedly makes verification of SSA properties marginally faster, but that's not the bottleneck.
Thank god I am not the only one!
Carsten Dominik, another physicist, was the creator of org-mode. I don't think physicist have an advantage over CS graduates, in fact reading code written by physicists is like watching and horror movie. But everyone can contribute a tiny bit.
You are right, a lot of my friends, who studied physics, take the jobs CS undergrads don't want to do, and get really low salaries...
There's a link to a Hungarian company called Unix Autó who have a product called InfoMix - which I initially scanned as Informix. That would've been a coincidence too far.
It does make me sad, because I know a lot of people who shelter themselves in computers, always wanting something more out in the real world but never being able to get their comfort zone wide enough to achieve it.
From https://dmrthesis.net/story-and-question/ (near the bottom)
"In his adult years Dennis had a reputation for being famously private.... There were topics that were completely off limits with Dennis – mostly having to do with any form of personal intimacy. This was true for his Bell Labs colleagues, who speak of Dennis’ personal life as a kind of private zone where they do not tread, and true with his siblings also. This was just his way.
"As an adult, Dennis lived an ascetic lifestyle. In September 1967, he moved back into the attic of his family home and set up a home office in the basement, where he lived with his parents until 1989. He worked from 1PM until 3AM six days a week, Sundays off for reading. He had no friends outside of his business colleagues, he rarely socialized, he did not have (nor never had) a relationship with anyone, he wouldn’t talk about/acknowledge discussion about emotional issues in any form. (He did have a wonderful family who loved him dearly and whom he loved dearly as well.) It was almost as if he needed to blot out any awareness of his personal life from the world by using the strategy of having no personal life to be observed.
"This affect wasn’t just something neutral, it could be an active force."
More broadly:
"As a youth Dennis was social and outgoing, then in young adulthood he transformed quite rapidly to become more private and anti-social. Hard to pin down exactly when this would have been happening… except that clues from John and Lynn’s interviews suggest perhaps sometime around February 1968 might be central."
It's a common mistake to say 'anti-social' instead of 'asocial'.
https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt?query=what%27s+the+difference+...
- No CSS on the page
- No JS on the page
- Gif for image
- Static site hosted using Nginx and plain old /www folder
- For some reason, reasonably responsive on mobile
Did I miss anything ? Oh yea, superfast page load.