In The Days Before LaTeX, PCs and Wordprocessors … There Were Typewriters, Tipex and Pen

In The Days Before LaTeX, PCs and Wordprocessors … There Were Typewriters, Tipp-Ex and Pens

I used to write lots of books. But not as much now, as is such a lengthy process, and by the time your book is released, it needs to be updated. For me, the Internet now provides me with a way to investigate ideas in a more dynamic way. Overall, though, we take the PC and the Internet for granted, and in the days before the rise of the PC and of the Internet, the process of publishing research work was a time-consuming process. My research is all about the future, so, as it’s nearly Christmas, let’s have a small dip into the past.

Finding papers

My small tip to any active researcher … and I don’t just mean academic researchers, as we should all try to keep up-to-date with the current research … is to read a new paper and an old ‘classic’ paper each week. For this I typically scan Google Scholar for papers published in the current year, and find ones that look like they are being highly cited:

In the example above we see 28 citations within the current year, so something interesting is happening with this paper. After giving it a quick scan, I download and then whenever I have a few minutes I try to sketch out the method involved, and implement it with some code.

The classic papers

For some reason, we sometimes scare of students from reading old papers, but it is these papers that often provide the core of a discipline. And so it is the classic papers that I love reading, and I often look for papers with over 1K citations. It is these papers which have often created a core contribution, and it’s difficult to understand the latest work, without seeing what the core fundamental knowledge is.

For this week, I’ve been researching the core work around verifiable secret shares, and Paul Feldman’s paper is one which has been used as a base for a great deal of current work:

What I love about these papers — published in the 1980s — is that the process for creating research papers is so much easier than it is now. For our researchers, they fire up Overleaf and can easily integrate their maths, references and figures. But in the 1980s, you were lucky if it was a word processor, but often it was an electric typewriter. There was also little chance that the researchers would have access to a typewriter, so they would often have to get someone to type it up for them. For this, you would often see written drafts of papers sitting the memo try and waiting to be “typed-up”. If we look at Paul’s paper, we see the standard sign of a typewriter not being able to cope with an EX-OR symbol:

With this, we can see that someone (normally the author) has asked for spaces to be added, and then had to mark-up nicely with a pen.

You also have to smile at the amount of effort that must have gone into a PhD thesis before the days of word processors, and where someone had to actually type out all the characters (and check) for this. In this case, we have Ralph Merkle’s classic PhD thesis, and where someone must have had to type out the encryption values:

And remember when we used to provide feedback in the margins of someone’s work? A great example of this was when Ralph Merkle, in 1974, pitched the idea of public key encryption to his Professor in a coursework definition and defined a method of key exchange (known as Merkle’s Puzzles). It was rejected by the Professor and was finally resurrected when Ralph heard of the work of Martin Hellman and Whitfield Diffie at Stanford. The text below says:

Project 2 looks more reasonable maybe because your description of Project 1 is muddled terribly

Ralph then submitted his idea as a paper to the Communications of the ACM, but was rejected, as his paper did not have a formal literature review or references to other work. For Ralph, he reasoned that there couldn’t have been references as there was no other work like this around. The paper was accepted three years later, but this time it has references to other work.

In the 1980s, though, there were some routes for researchers to actually layout their own papers. This typically involved a knowledge of Unix and Postscript, and often involved the usage of Apollo, Sun or Silicon Graphic’s worksations, and which had just come in to replace the standard DEC PDP 11 minicomputer. For me, the Sun 4 workstation was one of the best computers I ever had, and hooked up to a Postscript printer freed me from having to give someone else to type-up my teaching notes and research papers:

Conclusions

Things are so much easier these days in writing research papers, and in creating dissertations. But, remember, this is the vehicle, what matters is the intellectual thought …. so go change the world!

Be like a child again, and wonder why the sky is blue, and don’t take anything for granted. The phone in your pocket is the result of many decades of research and innovation. That GPS in your car has taken the finest brains in the world to crack something that looked impossible. And that brain in your head is the best machine ever created, so go and use it!

Let’s 2022 be the year of innovation and disruption … it’s out with the old and in with the new.

Merry Christmas to you and your family. And remember, the darker days are truly behind us.

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