Typewriters, Tipex and Pen

Typewriters, Tipex and Pen

It has been a very busy week. I was down at one of my favouriate academic places (Royal Holloway) on Tuesday, teaching on Wednesday, and then presenting a keynote in Glasgow on Thursday. But, where at one time I would take a book with me to read, I had my trusty iPad with as many electronic books as I could read in a lifetime. Oh, how times have changed!

At one time, too, I would have taken a paper copy of a research paper to read with me on my trips, but now I just load it into OneNote, and it’s there for me. I also loaded up OneNote with quantum computer theory, and I was all ready to hit the road. And, so, rather than those rather grand research papers that LaTeX produces, I grabbed a paper that my PhD student (Sam) has been working on, and gave it a good read. I am a great believer in reading the same papers as your researchers are reading.

The classic papers

Last week, Sam and I were investigating methods around using 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 of 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 in 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. If you are interested in learning about VSS, try here:

https://asecuritysite.com/shares/avss

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.

Postscript

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 hooking up to a Postscript printer freed me from having to give someone else having to type-up my teaching notes and research papers:

Conclusions

We live in a world where there are so many research papers published … it is often just so easy to publish a paper these days. But just because a research paper looks beautifully crafted doesn’t it has any real significance. The papers of the past — with their pen mark-up and their type — can be just as important to read as those produced these days. In fact, I think they are generally more important — as they show the fundamentals of the disciplines we have at our current time. So, if you’re an ECR (Early Career Researcher), go grab some classic papers — such as those with a few thousand citations, and read them. So, go read and “old” classic research paper. One of the best was by Diffie and Hellman.