I love how text is formatted in these documents. It shows a level of attention and care I don’t see often in modern markup/HTML/Word/Pages pipelines. Maybe it is some TeX magic but I like to believe they hand formatted the ASCII back then.
That thesis is from 1989. There were plenty of ASCII text formatting tools available back then, such as "nroff"[1] on Unix, which dates back to 1972. We weren't formatting hundred-page documents by hand.
(The RUNOFF program that nroff was based on was first released in 1964.)
input_file="my_file_downloaded_from_textfiles.txt"
cat <<TAO > "file.tex"
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[left=2cm,right=1cm,top=2cm,bottom=2cm]{geometry} % Adjust the global margin
\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage{beramono}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\lstset{%
language={},%
basicstyle=\ttfamily,%
linewidth=19cm,%
breaklines=true,%
breakatwhitespace=false,%
texcl=false,%
literate={\\\}{{\textbackslash}}1
}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty} % Remove page numbers
\lstinputlisting{"$input_file"}
\end{document}
TAO