PhysMath Central Blog
Evolution of TeX as told by Donald Knuth
Donald Knuth talking about how TeX came about
The Peoples Archive is a fantastic resource of many different people telling their life stories in front of a camera. All the stories are also transcripted for easy reading. What makes this a cut above any television interview you may have seen is the depth and length of the interviews. Donald Knuth, for instance, tells his life story in 97 parts. Most interviews last at least 2 hours and many over 4. In this kind of time you can learn much more about a person than you could otherwise hope to.
As an example, the evolution of TeX by Knuth is told in 10 parts. Here he tells about the poor galley proofs of the second edition of his Art of Computer Programming book and how that contrasted with the great galleys from an - at the time (1977) - unpublished book by Pat Winston:
I was about to do my first real sabbatical, by going, and I was planning to go to Chile in 1978 and learn Spanish, and, so, but in February of 1977 I see these proofs from Winston's book and I know that it's done with pixels, with bits, and that is a computer science solution. That means these pixels are zeroes and ones, these are in every part of the, in every tiny little part of the page you say, ink, yes or no, and yes or no, zeroes and ones, that's a computer. So, so printing had suddenly been reduced from a problem for metallurgists or from a problem for optic, people in optics, you know, photography and lenses to a problem in computer science, a problem about zeroes and ones. All of a sudden printing, high quality printing was just a matter of writing a computer program. And now, if anybody in the world can deal with zeroes and ones, it was me, right? Anyway, I'd been studying, you know, looking at galley proofs for ages, and my father had printing presses in the basement, I didn't mention that. So, I'm interested in type and I also, you know, see now that it's a computer science problem. So I changed my whole life plan. I wrote to the people in Chile saying sorry, I have to stay in California because we have special equipment here that I'm going to need to do my work with during the next year. I'm going to try to figure out a way to print my book by making it myself out of zeroes and ones instead of using any photographic or metal methods, and then, then I'd have perfect control over it, and if technology changes again, I'll be able to survive the change because I'll have the thing in digital form. And that was within a week of seeing the proofs of Pat Winston's book in February that I, that, I made this decision to stay at Stanford for my sabbatical year and work on typography.
Video 1 of 97 starts here: Donald Knuth - Family History
Posted by Chris Leonard at 14:22 Comments (0)