The Long-Lost Computation Dissertation of Unix Pioneer Dennis Ritchie:
Dennis Ritchie [...] is a revered figure in the history of computing. But before he became a legend for his contributions to the world of operating systems and programming languages, Ritchie was a humble graduate student in applied mathematics at Harvard University, spending his share of time playing videogames and arguing with the university library about the cost of binding an academic paper.
Recently the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley caught a glimpse of this forgotten moment in time, rediscovering a copy of Ritchie’s final dissertation which had been presumed lost for over half a century. Written in 1968, when he was just 27 years old, the paper is a chance to peek at the earliest days of computer science, to understand the challenges faced by pioneers who came before us, and appreciate an intellect that left behind a legacy we’re still building on today. But maybe it’s also a reminder of just how far we’ve come — and how much technology itself can change over the course of a single lifetime.
The news came in an announcement on the blog of Silicon Valley’s Computer History Museum by technology historian David C. Brock, the director of the museum’s Software History Center. Though they emphasize source code, the group “seeks to put history to work today in gauging where we are, where we have been, and where we are heading.”
In a blog post, Brock notes the museum’s Dennis Ritchie collection, which includes some of the earliest Unix source code dating from 1970 to 1971 — and points out their collection now also includes “a fading and stained photocopy” of Ritchie’s doctoral dissertation, “Program Structure and Computational Complexity.”
It also includes a cleaner digital scan of a copy of the manuscript owned by Ritchie’s graduate school friend, Albert Meyer.
The paper’s 28 footnotes include one citing Alan Turing’s 1936 paper “On computable numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”
“Recovering a copy of Ritchie’s lost dissertation and making it available is one thing,” jokes the museum’s blog post, “understanding it is another.”
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Tuesday July 14 2020, @02:25PM
Pages in the cleaner copy are slightly out of order.
(Score: 4, Funny) by RamiK on Tuesday July 14 2020, @04:04PM (2 children)
You argue with your librarian about paper binding costs, your dissertation gets "accidentally" misplaced for three decades.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @07:36PM (1 child)
Makes one wonder if the research was really usefull. If it was, one would expect that it would be referenced a few times, at least within the research group where the research was performed.
Then again, I've seen references that were passed along from student to student and didn't cover what was written down in the original reference (in which I was the one that actually looked it up and found things to be quite different).
(Score: 1) by Zinnia Zirconium on Wednesday July 15 2020, @01:22PM
Where are the trolls saying Dennis Ritchie shouldn't have written his dissertation?! Haha. Here's one!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @05:56PM (4 children)
We bow to thee
https://wiki.c2.com/?OneTrueBraceStyle [c2.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @06:32PM (1 child)
And theOneTrueDebugger
https://www.reddit.com/r/programmingcirclejerk/comments/gybiz4/while_printf_primary_purpose_is_to_serve_as_the/ [reddit.com]
(Score: 1) by anubi on Wednesday July 15 2020, @02:20AM
I respectfully disagree.
Braces should both open and close in the same column.
That way, you know which goes with which.
Un-matched Braces are mostly the root of my programming fiascos.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 14 2020, @08:30PM
Usenet refugees only:
Next jargon file entry is http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/I/Indent-o-Meter.html [catb.org] which leads to this page,
https://web.archive.org/web/20011115081603/http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/indent.html [archive.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @07:50PM
WTF C2, when did that start requiring flash and javascript to even load!? :(