How did Dennis Ritchie Produce his PhD Thesis? A Typographical Mystery

David F. Brailsford, Brian W. Kernighan, William A. Ritchie

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Dennis Ritchie, the creator of the C programming language and, with Ken Thompson, the co-creator of the Unix operating system, completed his Harvard PhD thesis on recursive function theory in early 1968. But for unknown reasons, he never officially received his degree, and the thesis itself disappeared for nearly 50 years.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationDocEng 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery, Inc
ISBN (Electronic)9781450395441
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 20 2022
Externally publishedYes
Event22nd ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng 2022 - Virtual, Online, United States
Duration: Sep 20 2022Sep 23 2022

Publication series

NameDocEng 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Symposium on Document Engineering

Conference

Conference22nd ACM Symposium on Document Engineering, DocEng 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityVirtual, Online
Period9/20/229/23/22

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science Applications
  • Information Systems
  • Software

Keywords

  • IBM 2741
  • archiving
  • digital restoration
  • electric typewriter
  • mathematical typesetting
  • postscript fonts
  • troff

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