Story Time!

Due to the huge groundswell of support for LaTeX themed posts I suppose I’ll humor you for another day and give you what you so lustily crave - more information about LaTex. Perhaps you’ll find the history of LaTex to be of some interest. I think it’s pretty cool. It’s filled with giants (in the field of computer science) and is the stuff of legend. Those readers who are of the breading persuasion may want to take note and include it as a bedtime story for your young ones.

The story begins with Donald Knuth. Donald Knuth is a dashing pioneer of computer science. Did you know that when he received his Bachelor of Science degree the faculty also simultaneously awarded him a Master of Science degree because they found his work to be so outstanding? Yeah, he’s that kind of smart. Knuth also won the very first Grace Murray Hopper Award (Grace Hopper is the computer scientist often credited for coining the term computer “debugging”) and a Turing Award amongst many others (although Knuth had to settle with winning the 9th Turning Award).

[For those playing the giants of computer science game at home Turning is credited with being the father of theoretical computer science and artificial intelligence. That test to see if you can tell if you’re IM chatting to with a real person or with a computer is named after him.]

Anyway, back to LaTeX. Knuth wrote a book in 1969 called The Art of Computer Programming. In 1977 Knuth received the proofs for the second edition of his book and thought they looked horrible. When he inquired why the second edition of his book looked like crap he discovered that the first edition of the book had been typeset using 19th century monotype technology which had since been replaced with new-fangled photographic techniques. The new-fangled techniques kind of sucked though. He had also recently been exposed to digital typesetting which offered higher quality…if you could actually get anything into it. So in order for his book to be printed better he decided to sit down and develop his own digital typesetting system. Sure, why not revolutionize an industry so that your book looks a little better?

Knuth thought he’d finish his digital typesetting program, which he called TeX, in under a year….turns out that it became more of an ongoing development process. Development on it was finally frozen in 1989. Although, during the 80’s people started to use and extended Knuth’s TeX system, the most popular extension of which is LaTeX still uses the core TeX typesetting engine with a more user friendly interface (although I find that hard to believe). Your children’s’ faces are sure to light up when you tell them that LaTeX was developed by no other than Leslie Lamport…. Yes, that Leslie Lamport. The one who invented Lamport Logical Clocks which are the basis for the vector clocks that allow distributed systems to order their messages. [He’s also the man who’s laid a lot of ground work in the field of temporal logic.]

So that’s our story. Exciting isn’t it. I know if you’re like me the only thing more interesting than talking about computer science is talking about historical computer science. Good luck getting the kids to bed…I bet they’re all wound up now.