[HN Gopher] Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died
___________________________________________________________________
Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died
Author : ggm
Score : 1227 points
Date : 2022-02-15 23:29 UTC (23 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ncwit.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (ncwit.org)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| All of our giants are passing away. Makes me a sad.
|
| Who is the next generation? I can't think of any names.
| mlac wrote:
| I have two thoughts on this:
|
| 1) our "giants" will be Zuckerberg, Elon, and Bezos. They have
| taken all the talent that would have gone to bell labs and used
| it to generate ad revenue.
|
| 2) our "giants" are still making their name and working, and we
| will recognize their accomplishments in 30-40 years.
| chipotle_coyote wrote:
| Your first point seems to be conflating workplaces and
| individual talents in order to make a snarky point about tech
| CEOs. I mean, I get it, but the "giants" that sergiotapia was
| referring to clearly aren't the people who _ran_ Bell Labs,
| Xerox PARC, SRI and BBN. (Also, to be persnickety, Tesla and
| SpaceX don 't make _any_ of their revenue from advertising
| sales, and while Amazon does have a growing advertising
| services business, it 's still a pretty small sliver of their
| overall revenue stream.)
|
| Your second point seems more reasonable, although I think
| klyrs makes a cogent point: the "giants passing away" now are
| primarily the ones who made their names in the pre-internet
| age. The next generation after them are the folks who were
| making their names circa 1980-2000, and we can hazard some
| plausible guesses. It may be too early to say yet who the
| anointed giants of 2000-2020 will be.
| anthk wrote:
| 9front guys with plan9's legacy being modernized. Gemini.
| NNCP as a disaster-resistant network. Solar powered
| minicomputers and devices.
|
| The future won't be like the 20th century one. It will be
| less power hungry.
| lanstin wrote:
| I got solar a few months ago and I am shipping 7kWh back
| each day and trying to find useful stuff for the
| electricity (may even give in the Air Conditioning crowd
| prior to temps hitting 35 Celsius). I am all for efficiency
| but cheap solar changes the material conditions
| significantly.
| [deleted]
| philovivero wrote:
| > Elon ... have taken all the talent that would have gone to
| bell labs and used it to generate ad revenue
|
| This is pretty unfair to Elon. He took all that talent and
| started putting things into space. And building the next
| generation of cars. He seems to be doing amazing work.
|
| Bezos and Zuckerberg, sure. Musk is in a different league,
| possibly an entirely different game.
| johnisgood wrote:
| What kind of talent are we speaking of here? I would not
| consider either of them talented in SWE.
| ghosty141 wrote:
| Musk is more of a great entrepreneur. His track record is
| quite impressive.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It's perfectly fair (for some value of fair). Both SpaceX
| and Tesla would not exist today if not for US government
| money, yet Musk bitches endlessly about government
| interference, as if his own personal fortune wasn't down to
| simply cashing out at the right time during the dot-com
| boom. Peter Thiel is right about one thing only: Musk is an
| entitled emerald scion braggart.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Ehh, lots of folks get billions of dollars of government
| money and have zero to show for it. At least with Elon we
| get cheap, reliable lift vehicles and 1-2 million EVs per
| year being built. It's easy to handwave away his hard
| work because it costs someone nothing but contempt, but
| if it was so easy why was he the one to do it? Because
| it's hard.
|
| He's obnoxious and yet surgically effective. Seems fair
| for the results, even when considering how much luck was
| a component (PayPal).
| beebmam wrote:
| Most giants I've met never make a name for themselves and
| prefer it that way.
| MurrayHill1980 wrote:
| There are probably several definitions of "giant" in play
| here.
| smabie wrote:
| How can you be a giant if you never make a name for
| yourself?
| coliveira wrote:
| You must learn that people working on UNIX or on Xerox
| Park were not there looking for fame. There was no
| indication early on that UNIX would be revolutionary.
| They just did their job as good as they could and the
| future took care of itself. People who are just trying to
| make a name for themselves usually go nowhere.
| mlac wrote:
| I can't edit my post, but I think there are good points here.
|
| The "ad revenue" comment was snarky and for Elon and Bezos
| may not be fair because they have had some major impacts to
| quality of life - Elon with electric vehicles and Bezos with
| availability of goods, AWS, etc. They both have given really
| smart people some really interesting problems to work, and we
| may recognize that in stories as they come out in 30-40
| years.
|
| Thinking a bit more about it, I think it takes a company
| today to make an impact given the complexity of technology.
| Things like dc and bc have been coded and discovered, and now
| we're building advanced products to do advanced things.
|
| Underlying my original comment is my concern for the
| allocation of brain power in technology today. I don't know
| what the right ratio is, but I do feel like we've got too
| many people going toward taking users' attention and
| discretionary income rather than working more valuable (on a
| societal level) problems.
| manuelabeledo wrote:
| > our "giants" will be Zuckerberg, Elon, and Bezos. They have
| taken all the talent that would have gone to bell labs and
| used it to generate ad revenue.
|
| If we compare these to people who contributed to basic
| science and technology, I think we must draw a line between
| industry giants and _enterprise_ giants.
|
| Morgan, Ford, Edison, Carnegie, Rockefeller, were enterprise
| giants.
|
| Tesla, Holonyak, Salk, were industry giants.
| klyrs wrote:
| Torvalds, Stroustrup, von Rossum, Larry Wall, Gates, Wozniak,
| to name a few.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Lorinda Cherry earned a Masters degree in 1969, so guessing
| she was born around 1948, meaning she'd be about 74 now.
| Steve Wozniak is 71, Stroustrup is 71, Larry Wall is 67, Bill
| Gates is 66, van Rossum is 66.
|
| Torvalds at 52 is the most clearly "next generation" of those
| people.
| petepete wrote:
| John Carmack? Fabrice Bellard?
| fmajid wrote:
| Dan Bernstein, Bryan Cantrill, Russ Cox, Udi Manber.
|
| And of course we lost one of the brightest lights way too
| early in Aaron Swartz.
| petepete wrote:
| The only thing I know about Bryan Cantrill is that 'have
| you ever kissed a girl?' post he made to a Linux dev in
| the late 90s.
|
| Funnily enough another hero, Miguel de Icaza, popped up
| in that thread too.
| ibejoeb wrote:
| Carmack for sure, if we're talking about prolific
| producers who really advanced things outside of academia.
| amelius wrote:
| Can't help but think that those people mostly redid what
| their parent's generation invented, but in a more
| practical/commercial way, which is an achievement in itself,
| but of a completely different kind.
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| I use those every week of every year.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| Is there a runnable version of her "typo" program anywhere? From
| the description at least, it sounds like a really cool idea.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| She's a hero to me, I use "bc" at least a couple of times per
| week.
|
| Thank you to Lorinda and everyone else working on UNIX
| operatingsystems and their tools, you make my life better.
| gameswithgo wrote:
| All yall going on about her programming and that's great but she
| was a rallycross racer for 21 years!!!
| macintux wrote:
| Found a transcript of an interview with her, not sure how old.
| Talks a great deal about the statistical analysis of text that
| McIlroy praised her for.
|
| https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/cherry.htm
| hn-new wrote:
| Less technical and detailed (but with some distinct stories and
| quotations):
|
| https://ncwit.org/profile/lorinda-cherry/
|
| Some other material:
|
| + An interview between Michael S. Mahoney and Lorinda Cherry:
| https://gist.github.com/telemachus/c01e3a213574a7bdcf79a4802...
|
| + Some mentions and quotes in this oral history of Unix:
| https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/unixhist/finalhis.htm
|
| I'd be curious to see her appearance on the Today Show that
| McIlroy mentions. She and [Nina
| Macdonald](https://www.ninamacdonald.com/pub.htm) were on in May
| of 1981 to talk about Writer's Workbench, but so far I can't find
| any video.
| usrbinbash wrote:
| Rest in Peace!
|
| Her demonstration of the capabilities of the (then novel) pipes
| and scripts of the Unix Operating System is one of the best parts
| of this documentary:
|
| https://youtu.be/tc4ROCJYbm0?t=935
| Ambroos wrote:
| I love what she does here: https://youtu.be/XvDZLjaCJuw?t=949,
| also demonstrating pipes and scripts. The input she chooses
| makes the whole segment pretty damn funny.
| todd8 wrote:
| I've used all three of these programs and never knew that the
| same person had written all of them. I still occasionally use bc
| --I started using it decades ago and prefer it to any calculator
| for basic use. For more complicated calculations I now tend to
| use the python RPL at the command line, but I'll always remember
| bc, dc, and eqn fondly. Thank you Lorinda Cherry.
|
| There may be some people out there that don't realize these
| commands are available on your machines. The macOS operating
| system on every contemporary Apple computer has a core that is
| build on Unix. Just open a the terminal app and you now have
| access to the only user interface that all of us old Unix users
| used for many years. At the command prompt you can learn how to
| use bc and dc simply by using the man command (short for manual).
| Type _man bc_ to get the brief page from the Unix manual
| describing bc (or any other shell command in the same fashion).
|
| One of the next commands you should look up in the manual is the
| man command itself (type _man man_ ). Somewhere, I've got the
| original thick printed Unix Manual. I used to carry it around
| just to read before the days when I had a dial-up terminal or
| personal computer at home.
| rmk wrote:
| I use bc all the time to do quick calculations. I never knew who
| the author was. I wonder how the software world will change as a
| generation of authors or maintainers of everyday programs dies
| off. Not all software package maintainers/developers have planned
| how things will continue after their death.
|
| The U.S. Government could fund some work into this, seeing as how
| a lot of open-source software is essentially a public good.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Thanks for everything, I love bc, use it relentlessly. Rest in
| peace.
| tmn007 wrote:
| Still use bc
| mastazi wrote:
| > In these years, Cherry recalls, the potential of the computer
| had barely been tapped, and if asked what she did for a living,
| she would say that her job was to "see what kind of neat new
| things I can make the computer do, and in those days the computer
| wasn't doing a lot, but it was super interesting and there was a
| lot more stuff you could make it do."
|
| It would have been so different. What we have now must feel like
| an Eternal September to anyone who was around back then.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Don't you just _ache_ to have missed it?
|
| Oh to have been forging that frontier!
| mbarbar wrote:
| Wonder what frontier we'll look back on in the same way in 50
| years.
| mastazi wrote:
| Yeah, I was wondering the same, I know for sure it's not
| the industry I'm in, which is now "mature" and boring. It's
| probably something we're not even familiar with because
| it's so niche. Or maybe it is something that we know, but
| to our eyes it doesn't seem that powerful. In the same way
| that people used to think of computers as just tools for
| doing multiplications and other arithmetic operations and
| they could have never imagined everything else that
| computers do.
| mukundesh wrote:
| "The eqn program was created in 1974 by Brian Kernighan and
| Lorinda Cherry. It was implemented using yacc compiler-
| compiler.[1]" eqn Wikipedia.
|
| Interesting to know that eqn pre-dates TeX, TeX was released in
| 1978
| ghoward wrote:
| As one of few authors of an implementation of `dc` and `bc`, but
| one who never actually met Lorinda Cherry, perhaps I have a
| slightly different perspective of her work.
|
| I've read the closest thing we have to the original sources of
| `dc` and `bc`: the source bundled with Plan 9. It didn't take me
| long to read the entirety of the source because they were simple
| and concise. That immensely impressed me.
|
| However, I hate to say that my youth (compared to Ms. Cherry, at
| least) caused me to look at the source with disdain, mostly from
| a lack of handling errors caused by user mistakes.
|
| It took several days for me to think more carefully about the
| context. She was writing for herself and other programmers, who
| would probably be able to recognize when they made a mistake and
| fix it.
|
| The code has a simple elegance that mine will never have. Sure,
| you might call mine "industrial strength," but I think a quote by
| ** Gabriel sums up the difference between Ms. Cherry's code and
| mine:
|
| "I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of early
| programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done. Old
| programs read like quiet conversations between a well-spoken
| research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague, not as a
| debate with a compiler. Who'd have guessed sophistication bought
| such noise?" [1]
|
| And that says nothing of the design of her software.
|
| `dc` was, and in many ways still is, the simplest calculator that
| could ever exist. It was the simplest shell too, with the `!`
| command. I personally believe that it was for this reason that
| `dc` was the first program Bell Labs made run on the PDP-11. [2]
| `bc`, while more complicated, is also a great design (for the
| time).
|
| In short, Ms. Cherry was a master of her trade, and I only
| recognized that from afar.
|
| One of the items I had in my bucket list was to meet Ms. Cherry;
| because of her work on `dc` and `bc`, I felt a kinship to her
| having written my own. It is sad to know that item will never
| happen. Oh, well.
|
| [1]:
| https://people.csail.mit.edu/alinush/6.824-spring-2015/l07-g...
|
| [2]: https://youtu.be/EY6q5dv_B-o?t=1767
| abrookewood wrote:
| That's a very insightful quote.
| dboreham wrote:
| fwiw the original dc/bc source was on the V7 tape and can still
| be found there:
|
| https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/dc
|
| https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/bc...
| atdrummond wrote:
| She would be the first to tell you that you have met her, by
| using her programs. Her programming style, which you've done a
| superb job of relaying, highly reflected her personality and
| the values she held dear.
|
| It sounds like you two would have gotten along splendidly had
| you met physically, from what I know from the time I spent
| working with her (albeit mostly virtually).
| ghoward wrote:
| Thank you for your kind words. I hope you are right.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I'm always delighted by the light touch and stillness of
| early programming languages. Not much text; a lot gets done.
| Old programs read like quiet conversations between a well-
| spoken research worker and a well-studied mechanical colleague
|
| Much of this was of course due to the lower performance of
| computing at the time - compilers just weren't highly
| sophisticated, and it made sense to code simply so as to
| leverage them as much as possible. That same attitude also
| extends to old-style "system design", which was often bespoke
| in a way that would not be very well regarded today. A
| hardware-portable compiled system like early Unix, designed for
| practicality and real use, was a _huge_ novelty back then.
| graderjs wrote:
| That's a pretty awesome tribute. Thank you for sharing!
| muizelaar wrote:
| Here's a copy of dc: https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-
| history-repo/blob/Researc...
| ghoward wrote:
| Thank you. It does look familiar.
| pietroppeter wrote:
| really a lovely thread, as an aside here is nice Nimplementation
| of dc called ad: https://github.com/subsetpark/ad
| throwaway5486nv wrote:
| One of the oldest math precision calculator was written by a
| women programmer. That cool. What other well know programs were
| written by the women authors.
| gabrielsroka wrote:
| Look up Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper.
| brettermeier wrote:
| There are not few. Margaret Hamilton * was lead Apollo flight
| software designer at Nasa for example.
|
| *:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Hamilton_(software_en...
| jeffrom wrote:
| i use bc just about every day, thank you!!!
| rodgerd wrote:
| I think the thing in her obit that most delighted me was the note
| that she developed an analysis of judges' decisions for dog
| competitions.
| mzs wrote:
| for me it was the rally car racing:
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20120624081721/http://www.scca-n...
| jeffsco wrote:
| I use bc a hundred times a day, it's invaluable. Thank you; RIP
| danielvf wrote:
| Does anyone have a link to her dog show judging bias paper? I'd
| love to read it.
|
| I knew some people on the dog show circuit a long time ago, and
| each judge having obvious bias for random dog aspects / ages was
| well known. Since dog breeders and serious dog show people would
| have many active dogs simultaneously, for each judge at an event,
| they would enter their closest matching dog to what the judge
| liked, and skip entirely if that wasn't your dogs. Thus if you
| had eight dogs you were currently showing, and a two day weekend
| event with two judges, you would bring two dogs, one picked for
| the Saturday judge and one picked for the Sunday judge.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Brian Kernighan is not mentioned in the obituary and nor should
| he be. Can we please change the HN title?
| ggm wrote:
| Sure. I changed it. I put it there because I expected some
| pedant to say "She didn't write eqn, Brian did"
|
| There is a very good non-obit by Doug McIlroy, written when
| Lorinda got an award in 2018. I was going to post it, but it's
| in a small listserv archive and I think the list members prefer
| not to be cited into these kinds of thing. I can't find the
| text elsewhere which is a shame, it has a really good rundown
| on her time at Bell Labs and the amazing things she did.
|
| I guess i could cut-paste it here, but that would exceed a 10%
| quoting rule I try to stick to. They're Doug's words, not mine.
| kasey_junk wrote:
| Thank you.
| MonkeyClub wrote:
| It'd definitely be an interesting read, could you pastebin it
| for us?
| ggm wrote:
| 4 levels down a comment threat is probably deep enough it
| doesn't cause problems. The list archive is actually fully
| publicly visible: https://minnie.tuhs.org
| /pipermail/tuhs/2022-February/025390.html
| kasey_junk wrote:
| That's really good. Thanks again.
| gsinclair wrote:
| Hear hear!
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| Wavey memories of typesetting my graduate thesis with eqn, nroff
| and dvi to postscript things all in a long Unix pipe chain.
| Thanks Lorinda.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| I just did `man dc` and then tried it out to run 1 + 2. I tried
| only entering the numbers, then tried writing "push 1", then
| guessed, that maybe it is just "p 1" and then guessed, that I
| also need to "p +" and hit "=" and return. Voila! Figured it out
| intuitively! Great!
| kristopolous wrote:
| It's still one of the quickest ways to do math on the command
| line.
|
| dc -e '3 k 57 47 / p'
|
| Or what have you.
|
| It's pretty useful. I recommend spending an hour or two with
| it. You'll use it.
|
| One of the nice things about rpn is if you forget something or
| want to modify things, you'll quickly find out that it's more
| convenient.
|
| A little syntax weirdness apparently goes a long way in making
| things ridiculously easier to manipulate.
|
| You can write programs with it btw. Hobby away:
| https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Category:Dc
|
| Things get delightfully cryptic:
| https://rosettacode.org/wiki/Generate_lower_case_ASCII_alpha...
|
| Go through a Forth tutorial to get the hang of RPN style
| programming if that's truly gibberish to you. It won't make it
| easy, but it will make it readable
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Haven't used a language with RPN as default, but Forth is
| somewhere on my endless "to look at at some point" list : )
| e12e wrote:
| Unless there's a difference between yours and mine `dc` that's
| not quite right: 10 # pushes 10 20 #
| pushes 20 + # pops 20 10 sums, pushes results p
| # prints top of stack (peek)
|
| Equal (`=`) is a conditonal macro invocation `=r`: pops two
| values off stack, invokes (the contents of register) `r` if
| they are equal. [p]sa # store peek stack top as
| macro in a 1337 10 20 + 30
| =a # Stack should be 1337, 30 (20+10) and 30, so should output
| 1337 # pops 30 and 30; 30==30;p -> top is 1337
| rizkeyz wrote:
| Rip, Lorinda. I'm using bc almost daily.
| every wrote:
| I use dc almost every day. I even do my taxes with it. I will
| forever be in her (and others) debt...
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Glad I'm not the only one.
|
| I started using dc for shell scripts before I knew that expr
| existed, and when some UNIX systems I logged on to spat out a
| bunch of noise on the console whenever bc was invoked. As a
| result I started thinking in the stack arithmetic way, and just
| adopted it as my standard way of doing math on UNIX. Eventually
| I got so used to it that I also preferred using it on Windows
| (via Cygwin) over calc.exe. It was a sad day when the developer
| world moved to Git Bash which either never included dc or
| stopped including it at some point. After a few years of
| grumbling with calc.exe and ancient versions of GNU dc that
| didn't work quite right in a Git Bash console, I discovered
| Gavin Howard's dc, which works well in Git Bash, and now it's
| once again one of the first things I install on a new computer.
|
| Remarkable how this program written ~50 years ago is still
| useful today, in whatever rebirthed incarnation. I can't think
| of many others with such staying power.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| vi, in its various incarnations, comes to mind.
| ghoward wrote:
| It's good to hear of another person using my `dc`! You're
| actually the second confirmed user; the other is a die-hard
| original Unix user that now uses NetBSD.
|
| That said, I'm glad my `dc` works for you under Git Bash, but
| it's weird that GNU `dc` wouldn't work.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| I can't remember exactly the problem - it was some time ago
| - but I think it might have been related to console input.
| Either it was built for Windows console and didn't quite
| handle mintty LF, EOF and line wrapping, or the other way
| around. Usually you can wrangle programs into working by
| using winpty, but it still didn't operate quite as smoothly
| as dc did under UNIX (or Cygwin). In the end I mostly ended
| up invoking it in a pipeline instead of interactively.
|
| Fortunately your dc worked out of the box with winpty a
| couple years back, and - to my delight - I just discovered
| the latest version works both in a modern Windows console
| and Git Bash mintty as well, without any winpty wrapping.
| Great work, thank you!
| ghoward wrote:
| You're very welcome.
| thanatos519 wrote:
| I <3 RPN and depend on dc every day and use it for calculations
| in shell pipelines! RIP.
| atmosx wrote:
| I love the fact that HN celebrates the largely unknown tech
| heroes of our times :-)
|
| I've used "bc" quit e a few times, thanks & RIP Lorinda.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| Using dc on a regular base whenever a small calculation is
| required - it's just so much more convenient compared to starting
| up a graphic ^H^H^H GUI calculator when you're in a
| shell+keyboard flow. And eqn is also much, much easier to use for
| basic high school math and casual use than all-mighty TeX. Used
| to document entire app suites using troff/eqn/tbl/pic in the 90s,
| order receipts and bills even, as well as preparing moderately
| math-heavy course material.
|
| RIP
| mprovost wrote:
| I pretty much always have an open terminal window running dc
| for doing quick calculations throughout the day. And I do my
| taxes every year in dc!
| graderjs wrote:
| RIP. I use bc in production for calculations in the shell.
| sulam wrote:
| bc is still my favorite calculator, 30 years after I first
| learned *nix (SunOS for me back then).
| jasone wrote:
| Similarly, I have used dc as my desktop calculator of choice
| since the mid-90s. It has been useful in many one-liner scripts
| too. A simple, powerful tool.
| tannhaeuser wrote:
| One-liners? dc is using reverse Polish, with newlines to
| separate tokens, or is there an alternate separator I didn't
| know all these years?
| somat wrote:
| tokens are separated on parsed input, where the token needs
| to be explicit, like two numbers in a row a space can
| separate them. An example from the manual. the first ten
| values of n!
|
| [la1+dsa*pla10>y]sy0sa1lyx
| khan-saib wrote:
| nullc wrote:
| scale=0
| greenyoda wrote:
| This article is a profile, not an obituary (I'd expect an
| obituary to state that she died, and give a date). What's the
| source that reported her death? I searched the web, but couldn't
| find any. At the moment, her Wikipedia article refers to her in
| the past tense, but doesn't cite a source for her death either.
|
| (In case the title changes, this comment refers to the original
| HN title: "Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died".)
| ggm wrote:
| It was reported on a mailing list of ex-Bell labs staff and
| other early UNIX users. This write up of her career was the
| best one I could find, sourced from information there. It's
| from 2018 when she got an award. If you have a better one I'd
| welcome it being posted.
| greenyoda wrote:
| Thanks for the confirmation. I first saw her mentioned when I
| started using Unix in 1979, and am sorry to hear of her
| passing.
| atdrummond wrote:
| Lorinda helped me massively with my attempts to bring back online
| some hardware that had escaped early 90s Bell Labs so that, as a
| pre-teenager trapped in rural Illinois, I could run Plan 9 and
| build some software for it. She did not stop at connecting me to
| the right people to locate the hardware I needed to restore my
| computer to the living. She also went above and beyond by
| introducing me to individuals whom I did not deserve to talk with
| nor did I appreciate how lucky I was to be sharing e-mails with
| these people at the age of 12. These unlucky (former) Labs
| employees included both Rob Pike and Ken Thompson.
|
| Lorinda, thank you for taking such extensive efforts to encourage
| my passion and interest in obscure operating systems. I have not
| lost my drive to explore this area of computing. My only wish is
| that I had sent you more than one of the coffee cakes from
| Morton, IL that you loved and said made us even. Hopefully,
| wherever you are now, you can have as much coffee cake as
| possible. Thank you again, truly.
| lifefeed wrote:
| The nice thing about celebrities in academic worlds is that
| they're so much more accessible than celebrities in big-money
| industries like acting or business. Their email is publicly
| available on their university pages, and IME they respond
| kindly and quickly.
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Lorinda helped me massively with my attempts to bring back
| online some hardware that had escaped early 90s Bell Labs so
| that, as a pre-teenager trapped in rural Illinois, I could run
| Plan 9 and build some software for it.
|
| Gnot or Blit terminals? Oh man if its a Gnot....
| atdrummond wrote:
| I'm Gnot saying it isn't one... ;)
| dylan604 wrote:
| wow, that's kind of crazy cool. 1) the help was offered at all.
| 2) to put you in touch with others (lots of personal cred at
| risk there) 3) they helped you out in kind 4) you were only 12.
|
| things sure were different in the 90s.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| Yes and no. Things were different, for sure. Hell end 80's I
| hung around a random polytechnic school at age 14, where I
| played to my hearts content with their professional CAD
| stations and programed their robotic arm. I had no reason
| being there, where it not that we visited once because my mom
| knew someone there, and the IT lab guy took a liking to me.
|
| But I'm _reasonably_ sure that if today I bumped into some
| random kid that was obsessed with anything 'geeky' that
| makes me fondly remember when I was that age, I'd jump on the
| opportunity. Wouldn't we all?
| jthrowsitaway wrote:
| Indeed. These days you're lucky if you can get a project
| maintainer to respond to a PR within a few years.
| atdrummond wrote:
| I agree. I think she was so chuffed that someone so young was
| interested in her work that she was willing to break social
| norms. I also think it definitely helped that I didn't
| mention a big reason I chose to pursue Plan 9 was that Glenda
| was such a cool mascot.
|
| While I'm mostly joking about that last part, Lorinda did
| always mention that my childishness was expressed in
| curiosity rather than blatant immaturity. She said that was
| the key to being able to exist in these professional spaces
| without drawing undue attention to myself. It also helped
| that I steeled myself by participating in Usenet, where often
| times it seemed people were competing to be the most toxic
| person in the collective.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The closest to that for me was being a just out of high
| school employee at an interesting post production facility
| that had some talented people in the engineering staff. I
| was a kid in a candy store, but all electronics and
| video/film based stuff. The engineers were probably taken
| off guard by my incessant questions of why/how/huh until
| they eventually realized that I wan't being a pest but
| actually learning what they were sharing. At some point,
| the questions were advanced enough they wanted me to switch
| departments. Definitely the best OJT situation I've ever
| been in, but that was 30 years ago now. damn.
| ad-astra wrote:
| Have you ever read "I Am A Strange Loop"? You may enjoy
| Chapter 5, "On Video Feedback" if I recall correctly.
|
| I have a hunch you'd enjoy it :)
| gowld wrote:
| I don't think a colleague and friend would disrespect someone
| for making an introduction to a kid, even if the kid turned
| out less cool than thread OP.
|
| Nowadays kids can befriend celebs on Twitter. It's easier,
| not harder.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Good grief. There's a huge difference in following someone
| on Twitter vs a personal email account. You think someone
| you meet that knows $famousCelebrity is just going to give
| you their email account? Really?
| mulmen wrote:
| The favorable reading is that friending a celebrity on
| Twitter is a historically low effort way to make contact,
| even if it is correspondingly low value. Everyone is
| "close". This means there are more opportunities for
| connection.
|
| It smells like a natural progression from the "old"
| internet of newsgroups and email.
|
| Is friending a celebrity on Twitter the same as getting
| an email or phone call from Ken Thompson on how to fix
| your old Bell hardware just because Lorinda Cherry put
| him up to it? No, of course not. But that connection
| _could_ happen over Twitter.
| blihp wrote:
| It was different prior to the mid-90's and the 80's (despite
| much more primitive tech) were even more fun. Two things
| happened around the same time: Bill Gates became the worlds
| richest man (and a household name) and a bunch of college
| dropouts started becoming overnight multi-millionaires (at
| least) with the dot com explosion which was well publicized.
| Prior to that, sure there was good money to be made in some
| areas of tech[1], but many were driven by interest rather
| than a career path and most non-tech people just regarded
| computers as those things they didn't understand. Most
| business people regarded computers as fancy calculators that
| did the accounting and it was hella-hard to even get them to
| learn about spreadsheets. So geeks were pretty much left
| alone and programming wasn't seen as the mail room job on the
| path to getting rich it is today.
|
| In that environment, a lot of adults were willing to give
| technically minded kids at least some amount of their time
| because the only reason most of us (kids, at the time) were
| asking questions was because we just wanted to understand how
| all this stuff worked for fun rather than working on a get
| rich quick scheme. I also suspect the adults found this
| enthusiasm more interesting than the general disdain they
| probably experienced at the office.
|
| [1] As in, put in some time and develop an area of expertise
| that someone valued... _then_ you could start making money.
| Most college grads were viewed as fairly useless for their
| first few years out of school and their salaries reflected
| that.
| Lio wrote:
| Yeah there was this odd change over. I'm not exactly sure
| when but probably around the dotcom boom.
|
| I remember that if you said you mentioned computers people
| in general would just parrot that back to you in this
| "nerd" voice as if it was a joke.
|
| It was rare to even read about what was happening in the
| world of computers in a mainstream newspaper.
|
| To me, a kid at the time, I felt like I was seeing the
| gateway to a new kind future unrolling but there was just
| no way to discuss that with "normal" people at the time.
|
| I guess any adult working in that industry would be keen to
| share that with anyone interested regardless of age because
| it was all changing so fast and was so damn exciting.
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| I don't know - it also went away with the bust. I picked CS
| as my major shortly after the bust and everyone advised me
| against it. Between the bust and outsourcing I was told I
| would be making minimum wage.
|
| And, welp, here we are.
| gnat wrote:
| Things were different. I had a similar experience with
| Michael Hart from Project Gutenberg. I stayed in his house!
| He was ridiculously warm and welcoming.
|
| You can't imagine what scarcity of nerds there was back then.
| These days, every city has hundreds or thousands of
| programmers. But in the 90s -- for any area of computer
| interest -- there were only a few hundred of you around the
| world. It was wonderful to meet someone with the same
| interests.
|
| Being interested in programming/hardware/security
| AUTOMATICALLY made you a member of a small club. Most of the
| other members were glad to help you. And there wasn't a
| surplus of people all trying to stand out and be noticed on
| social media. (In fact, because you were into computers for
| the love of them, you probably weren't even thinking along
| the lines of "I must get noticed by $celeb so I can ask them
| for a job". The odious phrase "personal brand" had not been
| coined yet, and the concept was foreign to most in our
| computer nerd world.)
|
| It lasted until around 2008 or 2010, I reckon -- about the
| point at which "go into computers, it has good money", the
| success of YC, and the rapid growth of FAANGs really made
| nerds ubiquitous. Then Marvel/Disney turned our niche
| interests into the mainstream, and we became culturally
| adrift. We were in sitcoms (Silicon Valley, even Big Bang
| Theory to a great extent) and fully mainstreamed. At that
| point, you could ask someone for something but you were just
| one of an ocean of unremarkable others.
|
| That's how things were different in the 90s and (as a white
| English-speaking het guy who had Internet access) gosh I miss
| those times.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Computer nerds suddenly became attractive when Bill Gates
| made his first $billion. Before that we were pariahs <g>.
| deckard1 wrote:
| I had an old IBM XT clone sitting in my bedroom at the
| age of 12-13. I brought a friend over once and he called
| me a nerd. Not the "nerd" of today. Back then it stung.
| He said it with a bit of disgust, as if he learned some
| dark secret I had been harboring. I even loaded up
| Catacomb 3-D (a very early id Software precursor to
| Wolfenstein 3D) to prove I can be cool too. It didn't
| really work.
| zaphar wrote:
| I was and still am a computer nerd and I was never a
| pariah. I'm sure some nerds out there felt like it. But,
| anecdotally, that was not my experience.
| [deleted]
| WalterBright wrote:
| Consider movies at the time that had computer people in
| it. They were always portrayed as bumbling, inept people
| with bad greasy haircuts, odd clothing, pimples, and tape
| holding their glasses together. The hero would always
| berate them with "speak English, please".
|
| You can also see it in the Seattle sketch comedy "Almost
| Live" series, whenever they did a bit on Microsoft.
|
| Myself, I learned to avoid mention of my profession when
| meeting women.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Even at Caltech at the time, being a computer nerd was
| not popular. Popular was physics (possibly because
| Feynman was there at the time). Astronomy was popular,
| too. Back then, however, nobody had any inkling of how
| much money could be made from computers.
| marincounty wrote:
| nvarsj wrote:
| I can definitely relate with this. Grew up hacking IBM PCs
| in the 90s, got heavily involved in BBSs as a young kid,
| even wrote letters to random software developers (remember
| scorched earth?).
|
| I really dislike the modern tech industry. I think that
| money ruined everything. Vast majority of my coworkers over
| the last decade or so are the type that used to train to be
| doctors, lawyers and other lucrative careers, with no real
| passion in computers or tech. It's all about money.
|
| I do dream about changing careers. I know at least one
| other thing I'd love to do but it would pay a fraction of
| what I can make now and simply isn't feasible.
| andi999 wrote:
| I think a few hundred programmers in the 90s is
| underestimating the numbers by a factor of at least 1000
| and (probably much much) more. Of course such numbers are
| difficult to estimate, but here some pointers: It was
| introduced in school in several countries in the early 80s:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_science_education
|
| And there was vast literature. Petzolds programming windows
| first edition is from 1988 and second from 1990. While the
| first might have been a niche publication usually there is
| only a second edition if there is substantial interest.
| (number of prints would be nice to know).
| zamfi wrote:
| I'm not sure the OP was making this claim exactly -- I
| think they just meant for any _particular_ interest (like
| running Plan 9 on some old hardware) there were probably
| only a few hundred people around who shared that
| particular interest.
| andi999 wrote:
| Could be. But any particular interest is def not true
| (windows programming), so more like some niche interest.
| But this is the definition of niche interest, isnt it.
| Aeolun wrote:
| I can count on one hand the number of people I've met
| that did windows programming, both before or after 2005.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Computer programming was a nationally available subject
| in secondary schools in the UK in the mid '70s.
|
| I co-wrote a noughts and crosses program to run on a
| Busicom in 1973; and continued programming at university
| ('74-'77).
|
| See, inter alia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesil,
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Busicom.
| gnat wrote:
| You're right. I said "for any interest" but obviously,
| like all things attention there's a power law
| distribution. Many Windows programmers, or anything else
| that had massive interest. But if you were a Unix kernel
| nerd, there weren't many Unix kernel nerds around. If you
| were a Perl programmer, there weren't that many Perl
| programmers.
|
| But even given the prevalence of Windows development, it
| was still rare to encounter another programmer socially
| unless you lived in the occasional city where they were
| common. My point is that nerds finding nerds was a much
| rarer thing back then.
| ngc248 wrote:
| >>> really made nerds ubiquitous
|
| It did not make nerds ubiquitous. It made nerd wannabes
| ubiquitous. The ppl with OG nerd-like qualities are
| actually frowned upon in the industry now. Somehow a SWE
| needs to be a "well rounded" individual. Technical skills
| don't matter much anymore.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've heard it described as "social gentrification", but
| that particular article tried to defend offensive
| behaviour (think 4chan) as a personality trait or a way
| to keep 'normies' at bay. I don't think that's the way to
| go either, because the very same type that defends their
| offensive and antagonistic behaviour will suffer from
| loneliness as well. The venn diagram overlaps a lot
| there.
|
| But that particular blog post aside, you do make a good
| point. The 'nerd' in my head (and / or the one that I am)
| doesn't score too well on EQ and social skills, or to be
| even more blunt, is often on the autism spectrum and has
| to mask to match those expectations from the more
| neurotypical folk. But that said, I think one has to mask
| even with other neurodiverse people, because else they
| will just rub each other the wrong way.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| This.
|
| Way back in the 90's I reached a conclusion that a
| programmer or sysadmin or hardware guy is now just the
| new auto mechanic.
|
| '98 or so I was shopping for replacement software for my
| uncles business (y2k prep) and we went to this firms
| office, and basically everyone in the office, the owner,
| all the developers, the sales guy, the guy who would come
| out to install the hardware... every one of them could
| have been in their high school football team 10 years
| earlier. They were doing this kind of job because there
| was money in it full stop. They took us out to dinner and
| the conversation only comfirmed that snap perception. You
| could substitute "propane and propane products" in place
| of software and IT hardware without changing a thing
| about any of them.
|
| Perversely today I probably wouldn't use the same
| comparison because auto mechanic is probably more nerdly
| and interesing persuit today than it used to be.
|
| I think what I mean to say it's now a trade.
|
| You might be a nerd in that trade just like you might be
| a nerd welder, but it's no longer required. You don't
| even have to be a wannabe nerd although many are.
|
| Countless people in those jobs with no special love of
| it, and no fundamental curiosity.
|
| School counselors told them it was going to be in demand,
| so they did that.
|
| I think it's both better and worse today since then.
|
| Obviously the sheer mass of IT work needed today, and the
| sheer mass population of people needed to do it, means
| that there are a many many people doing IT work that
| aten't good at it and don't love it.
|
| Obviously today it's no longer special to to work with
| computers.
|
| And there is also the ever present dislike for
| intellectuals in general that hurts nerds even at the
| same time when there is some nerd cache from making
| money. (actually I bet the nerds don't even make the real
| money any more. they get harnessed by the business types)
|
| But I think it's also true there are more actual nerds
| today and they are more accepted than in the past. Still
| outnumbered by wannabes and everyone else, and the real
| nerds still not really liked or taken seriously by most,
| but more and better than 20 years ago.
| Aeolun wrote:
| What I dislike now is that previously I could assume that
| anyone with the same interest had some form of passion
| for the craft, but now they're swallowed up in a sea of
| people that are there -like you said- just for the money.
|
| They still want to know enough to not get fired, but
| that's where it ends.
|
| I kind of feel it pulls the average down though, and it
| makes my work environment less ideal.
| zaphar wrote:
| There will always be a place for those of us who like
| tinkering with software and/or computer hardware, the
| nerds. We like using the CLI or Vim or Emacs. We go deep
| on compilers and PLT. But I personally welcome those who
| aren't nerds in the same way. I like showing them how to
| be more efficient in their work, build more
| robust/reliable software, and helping them understand the
| job they are doing better. Maybe, I'm nerding out about
| mentorship but I find it rewarding to help the non-nerd
| become just a little more nerdy in their career. It's an
| opportunity not a problem.
| yumaikas wrote:
| Niche and Nerdery is fractal, I find. I also find sharing
| my findings from exploring random niche corners of
| obscure topics to be rewarding.
| ngc248 wrote:
| I agree, the Tech field has exploded and lotsa people are
| into it which is a good thing. But when anything goes
| "mainstream" it loses its charm, it loses the X-Factor
| which made it special.
|
| Tech companies have lost that charm now. I have worked at
| companies where doin a good job does not even matter
| anymore. Its all about "projection" and "perception"
| dylan604 wrote:
| Makes you think how not ridiculous the scene from War Games
| where they get stuck on an island and the guy just lets
| them stay in his house when they miss the ferry. Makes for
| convenient story telling that in today's standards just
| seems like would be a 'awhellznaw' kind of response.
|
| Or the Neil Degrasse Tyson story of how he met Carl Sagan.
| kqr wrote:
| That easily happens also today in less densely populated
| areas.
| mulmen wrote:
| Is it so different today? Kids are still curious and reliant
| on their elders to both provide and mentor. It's our turn to
| be the Lorinda (or Ken Thompson) to some other curious kid.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| The 90s were like that. Tech was a much smaller community and
| you could cold email just about anyone with a decent
| probability of a response because being on the Internet was a
| highly selective filter in its own right. In its own way, it
| was a golden age in terms of accessibility to really smart
| people.
|
| It was a brilliant moment in time. I was able to routinely
| chat with an astonishing number of excellent and famous minds
| when I was young and impressionable in a way that would never
| happen today. I feel very fortunate to have lived that, it
| had an enormous impact on my life I think. And it was safe
| for the people I corresponded with to be accessible back
| then.
| gonzo wrote:
| Things were different. Michel Gien (co-founder and CEO of
| Chorus) would couch surf at my place when he was in Austin on
| business.
| qq66 wrote:
| You can get access to people at age 12 that you wouldn't get in
| a million years at age 20.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I dunno, I feel like I'm pretty close to the aforementioned
| Rob Pike and Ken Thompson through working with Go; I feel
| like if I ever had a deep question about or issue with the
| language I could reach out to them through the mailing list.
| It's more a matter of having something to talk to them about
| than finding and reaching them I think.
| geenew wrote:
| One of my achievements in life is a email exchange I had at
| around the same age with someone from Cray, a conversation
| sparked after a newsgroup post about the model of computers
| used in the book version of Jurassic Park.
|
| It wasn't anything as extensive as what op is talking about
| but it made a deep impression on me. Something like the
| nerdling equivalent to getting a baseball hat signed. The
| potential with email to speak directly with people working in
| rarefied places was eye opening. It also gave a real
| confidence boost that I could stumble on interesting things
| to say.
| jacobolus wrote:
| You shouldn't stop trying at age 20 (or 30, or 40...), as
| long as you are earnest, not too much bother, and aren't
| worried about not always getting a response.
|
| If you show interest in people's work, especially if you have
| questions, corrections, etc. that demonstrate that you are
| engaging with it seriously, even "famous" people are often
| happy to respond (but people certainly also often don't
| respond to cold emails, for a wide variety of reasons).
| smoldesu wrote:
| RMS is pretty famous for responding to pretty much any
| query, for better or worse. There's a treasure trove of
| fantastic email responses to questions like "do you watch
| anime?" and "what do you think of my birthday card?"
|
| I've seen a number of people rag on him, espousing that
| he's got nothing else to do (they may well be right) but it
| makes me respect the guy even more to know that he's
| replying to emails, even when they're dumb, instead of
| watching TV or browsing Twitter. He's a real consummate
| professional, even when the people around him aren't.
| nimfan wrote:
| I dimly recall receiving a call from RMS one Saturday
| when I must have been in high school. I was working (on
| my own) on porting the ETH Modula-2 compiler from VAX/VMS
| to a NS32032 based "co-processor" board that plugged into
| the pc isa bus (an early hardware design from Trevor
| Marshall of YARC Systems). I think RMS asked if I would
| port the compiler to GNU, but alas I told him I knew
| nothing about Unix back then. The NS32032 went no where,
| but my compiler porting effort got me my first job with
| an interesting (to me) startup!
| Thoreandan wrote:
| > RMS is pretty famous for responding to pretty much any
| query
|
| Can confirm. In 1990, I managed to send him a letter from
| a borrowed Internet account (I didn't have an email
| address at the time.) He tracked me down and telephoned
| me(!!), I still remember his friendly demeanor, and at
| the end of the conversation he said "Happy hacking!".
| robertlagrant wrote:
| I'm 40 now! I'd better start emailing people :D
| 6354dhjgasd wrote:
| Ever actually tried? I've contacted well-known people in
| their field (most recently Hugh Darwen for an obscure
| database question) and I find them very willing to help if
| you don't waste their time. Stop with the it's-all-stacked-
| against-us-don't-even-try bullshit.
| kqr wrote:
| It's crazy to realise that these people you look up to are
| actually other human beings and with just a little bit of
| luck you can strike up a normal conversation with them and
| they won't hate you for it!
| pooper wrote:
| I am scared to ask another team question about my work
| without checking documentation twice because I'm scared
| I'll ask something that's already covered in detail
| somewhere.
|
| I am very good at asking stupid questions. Thankfully, my
| teammates are patient with me.
|
| Can you imagine wasting the time of one of the brilliant
| minds of our times and it turns out to be user error?
|
| I would say try to sleep on a problem before reaching out
| for help if time permits. Probably isn't good for
| business but it is good for my personal development.
| 6354dhjgasd wrote:
| Exactly what you say; sleep on it first. Make sure you've
| done your background work. But then, don't be afraid to
| contact them.
|
| > I am very good at asking stupid questions. Thankfully,
| my teammates are patient with me.
|
| Are your questions really so stupid, are theirs really so
| much smarter when they ask, or are you being harsh on
| yourself perhaps.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| It's not about being stacked against one, it's more that
| one understands the constraints other might have and is
| more hesitant to reach out, instead of doing a round more
| of research yourself and using more general forums first.
| ezequiel-garzon wrote:
| Indeed, that tends to change again in your 1000030's.
| cgio wrote:
| i still get access at age 45; I think what changes is not the
| propensity of people to answer but the audacity of people to
| ask.
| ILMostro7 wrote:
| The motivations of adults are, usually, not the same as
| those of younger people, so that some people may be more
| skeptical to respond, too. Obviously, I'm generalizing
| here. But there are logical reasons behind that.
| dheera wrote:
| I think also people just instinctively feel bad turning
| down a child's request.
|
| There's also that if you're 45 years old, people expect
| to see some accomplishments, and are skeptical if you
| don't have any, whereas there is no such bar for 12-year-
| olds other than perhaps curiosity and ambition.
| Aeolun wrote:
| It's more that I'm happy to help people if they show me
| they've done their homework. The homework required of a
| 12 year old is obviously zero, because if they're asking
| me they already know more than they should.
| fsloth wrote:
| The ghost of Steve Jobs would disagree - "Make the call".
| Anyway it's awesome you can form spontaneous human connection
| with other people from most surprising of places if you only
| try. I suppose the pathological twist to this is all of those
| phone-center scams...
| rgmerk wrote:
| It depends. Most famous people in tech aren't going to answer
| easily Googleable questions from a 20-year-old (or a 40 year
| old) But if you've got a genuine reason to be asking them,
| they respond more frequently than you'd think.
|
| I wanted to use a purported quote from Maurice Wilkes that I
| couldn't track down a citation for in the introduction to my
| PhD thesis, so I emailed him. He must have been well into his
| eighties by that point. I got a very helpful reply and was
| able to use the quotation, properly cited (as well as add a
| "Wilkes, personal communication" to my citation list, which
| still makes me smile).
| nickdothutton wrote:
| But what was the quote!?
| svat wrote:
| The tool `eqn`, which she wrote (joined by Brian Kernighan) is an
| "ancestor" of TeX: The mathematical syntax of TeX (design started
| 1977) was based on eqn (1975). For example, the eqn paper
| (https://research.swtch.com/eqn.pdf) has the expression
| sum from i=0 to infinity x sub i = pi over 2
|
| which would have been entered as something pretty close to that
| in the first draft design of TeX (the second draft introduced the
| backslashes), and today as: \sum_{i=0}^{\infty}
| x_i = {\pi \over 2}
|
| and you can see the evolution. The Wikipedia page has more
| examples
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eqn_(software)&ol...
| ). Knuth credits Lorinda Cherry explicitly a couple of times in
| the first draft design
| (https://www.saildart.org/TEXDR.AFT[1,DEK]):
|
| > A special syntax is used in formulas, modeled on that of
| Kernighan and Cherry, Comm. ACM 18 (March 1975), 151-157. For
| example, ``sup 9'' in line 41 specifies a superscript 9, ``sub
| {n+1}'' in line 74 specifies a subscript n+1.
|
| and in the last page/paragraph:
|
| > _To conclude this memo, I should explain how TEX is going to
| work on math formulas. However, I will have to sketch out the
| code in more detail and it is only fuzzy in my mind at the
| moment. [...] it may be necessary to build the parse tree first
| as Kernighan and Cherry do._
|
| (Yes indeed TeX builds the parse tree first, as we can see from
| the second draft: https://www.saildart.org/TEX.ONE[1,DEK] )
|
| The eqn system was a pioneering and capable one: although Knuth
| did not use any of the code of troff/eqn as-is (not sure if it
| was available to him; in any case he was targeting "book"
| quality), clearly it influenced the design, and I imagine it
| inspired him about what was possible in the first place. Even
| after TeX became widely used, there have been some math books
| typeset with troff and eqn.
|
| Reading about Lorinda Cherry's other accomplishments like `typo`
| and the Writer's Workbench, it's clear we've lost someone who was
| a pioneer in multiple respects.
| e12e wrote:
| After having a look at:
| https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/unix-text-processing/97...
| and a few man pages, I figured I could play with eqn like so:
| eqn -Tpdf - <<eof | groff -me -T pdf > eqn.pdf .EQ
| sum from i=0 to infinity x sub i = pi over 2 .EN
| eof xdg-open eqn.pdf
|
| I did not have much success trying to force it throug
| groff/troff and render pretty in a (wayland) terminal - with
| neither `--text` (as below) or `--tty`. But perhaps there is no
| such "magic" renderer? eqn -Troff -Tutf8 -
| <<eof | groffer --text |less -R kEQ sum from
| i=0 to infinity x sub i = pi over 2 .EN eof
| smorrebrod wrote:
| I am not aware of a powerful tty renderer. Groff looks like
| it's aimed at paper outputs first. Also eqn can be called
| with `groff -e` (other preprocessors also have their flag)
| and inf (instead of infinity) produces a correct infinity
| glyph.
| anthk wrote:
| groff -step -k < input.groff > output.pdf
| bear8642 wrote:
| > (G)roff looks like it's aimed at paper outputs first
|
| Indeed - seem to remember (?Brian) comment one journal
| turned down a paper due to how well typeset is was
| believing it'd been printed elsewhere before
| eole666 wrote:
| `eqn` looks way more readable than TeX.. All those \ are making
| my eyes bleed.
| mukundesh wrote:
| Completely agree, 'eqn' was a pioneering achievement followed
| by TeX and Mathematica
| fjfaase wrote:
| I somehow feel it is a pitty that Knuth went on to design his
| own method for describing mathematical expressions, as his
| seems to less semantic and more based on representation. Note
| how in his notation the two '_' have a total different semantic
| meaning, while in eqn different syntax is used. His method is a
| more consize, but even not that much, but her method is much
| closer to how the resulting expression is read. I did have a
| look at the paper mentioned and note that terms like 'sub' and
| 'sup' are also related to position. An even more semantic
| approach probably would use 'x power 2' instead of 'x sup 2'.
| medstrom wrote:
| I've so often wanted to replace LaTeX snippets in my org-mode
| documents with machine-readable `eqn` snippets (or maybe
| SageMath snippets). I'm sure someone out there must be
| sitting on an unpublished groundbreaking setup that pulls
| this off.
| tpmx wrote:
| Here she is demoing Unix, pipelines, etc. (1982)
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvDZLjaCJuw&t=828s
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| Possibly the most amazing thing is that speak(1) is actually
| functioning in _1982_ !! And remember, it 's not just the
| software, you need some sort of DAC connected as well. Granted,
| Max Matthews had done the first digital synthesis of sound
| nearly 30 years earlier, but there's no sign that Cherry is
| working in an digital audio lab. She's on a terminal, probably
| connected to what was then called a "minicomputer" ... with a
| DAC!
| srcreigh wrote:
| I love how she takes a sip of her coffee/tea when she has to
| wait for the computer
| darkwater wrote:
| Thanks for the video! How come we lost the `lowercase` command?
| I know you can use `tr` or `sed` among others to accomplish the
| same but I would still love to have a `lowercase` command :)
| macdice wrote:
| It's interesting that uniq is spelled unique in that video. I
| wonder who changed that!
| bspammer wrote:
| I was wondering what "mismatch" was too, turns out it's
| comparing to the system dictionary
|
| https://github.com/watson/old-unix-spell-
| checker/blob/master...
| tonto wrote:
| such a cool video
| gameswithgo wrote:
| even now it is all pretty slick especially for people who
| have always been in GUI operating systems, at the time it
| must have seemed like wizardry.
| hackernj wrote:
| I remember her from my summer job in 1980 in the Computer Library
| at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, NJ. She was one of the few women in
| computer science department. Nice bunch of brilliant people who
| patiently answered my newbie questions about Unix, Shell, C, etc.
| [deleted]
| gsinclair wrote:
| > She worked on several influential mathematical tools, including
| a desk-calculator language (bc); TeX and eqn, both typesetting
| systems for publishing mathematical formulae...
|
| Saying she worked on TeX seems incorrect. Can anyone confirm
| either way?
| drfuchs wrote:
| I think the lovely comment by svat covers the extent of her
| contribution to TeX: the eqn language informed the design of
| TeX's math-mode syntax. But that's all I'm aware of; it seems
| the much-copied quote you mention is off base. Keep in mind
| that TeX was initially written in Sail, which had no Unix
| compiler, and also assumed 36-bit words, which no Unix system
| had. The later rewrite of TeX that ran on 32-bit machines, and
| finally became available on Unix, pretty much retained the Sail
| version's existing math syntax.
| kreelman wrote:
| Many thanks Lorinda for bc. A super useful tool. Rest in peace.
| taf2 wrote:
| I like her quote - " see what kind of neat new things I can make
| the computer do, and in those days the computer wasn't doing a
| lot, but it was super interesting and there was a lot more stuff
| you could make it do."
|
| Still true today!
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| Here's a good interview with her [1] which I happened across
| indirectly via a discussion here about the most surprising Unix
| programs [2]
|
| [1] https://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/transcripts/cherry.htm
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22574603
| easton wrote:
| Hey! She was having the same problems we're having:
|
| > 'Cherry: That's hard to say. If you look at the Berkeley Unix
| system and some of the commands that are similar, the same in
| Berkeley as what we have here but you look at the Berkeley
| manual they've added 85 flags to the Cat command or something.
| It was a very simple elegant thing that did a very simple job.
| I guess we've always had the attitude that it has to be really
| useful to be worthwhile putting in. Maybe just 'cause it was a
| smaller group than at Berkeley or maybe people in Berkeley,
| everybody needs to find a niche so they've got to put a flag on
| something, I don't know what the environment is there. But I
| think it was here to prevent featurism. I think that's the
| difference between the two systems. And I think that
| undoubtedly has to do with the university environment where
| everybody has to do something as opposed to the environment
| where in some sense everybody had to justify what it is they
| were doing to your cause. And there is also some hesitancy
| 'cause it you touched it you owned it, you thought hard about
| whether you needed to add that flag or whether there was some
| other way around it. Whether there was some program. You said
| "I'll find some other way to do this 'cause I don't want to own
| this program."'
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