What Do We Know About How It Was Typed?
For starters, we can’t say for certain how Dennis’ thesis was typed. Our experts Chuck Bigelow and David Brailsford believe it was typed on an IBM Selectric typewriter with golf-ball typing element, but thus far they have not been able to identify a specific IBM type element that possessed the exact fonts used by the thesis. There is a lot to suggest a Selectric so our description below assumes that is what Dennis used, but the possibility remains that it was typed on an IBM Executive, an Olivetti, or some other manual typewriter popular in the mid 1960’s.
Dennis could have typed it himself, or potentially he could have had it professionally typed by a technical secretary. According to fellow student Albert Meyer, it was common at Harvard for a student’s thesis advisor to have access to a department secretary who could be recruited for typing duty. In fall 1967 when the document presumably was being written, Dennis lived in New Jersey and worked at Bell Labs. It is also conceivable that a Bell Labs technical typist produced his thesis for him.
Another possibility is that he typed his thesis on an IBM 2741 terminal connected with CTSS to an IBM 7030 computer at MIT. The 2741 uses a Selectric typewriter mechanism, in theory anything typed by hand on a Selectric should also be able to be typed using software commands along with manual adjustments on a 2741. We know that Dennis had a CTSS account from grad school days that remained active at the Labs with the Multics project. Our family recalls that Dennis had a WATS line and a Selectric style terminal in his home basement office though can’t recall when these were installed.
Typographically, the thesis is dense and complicated, full of multi-level mathematical equations and special symbols. It runs nearly 180 pages. Most of the pages include at least a few sub-and-superscripts, many pages are brimming with them. Dennis used about 40 different mathematical characters and Greek letters throughout the dissertation.
Its typographical complexity alone made Dennis’ thesis an outlier. The technology of the day required that each sub-and-superscript character be hand-adjusted on the page using manual escape mechanisms. This was a labor intensive process, the more characters needing adjustment the more labor required. Dennis didn’t hold back, his dissertation could well have been the “hardest” thesis for a typist to clack out of any dissertation from the 1960s.
There’s another feature that distinguishes this thesis other 1960s math dissertations. Dennis positioned his sub-and-superscript characters exactly above or below their main reference line, not at fractional distance as was common to other math papers. As we examine the dissertation page by page, it appears that all the characters are being controlled together. The positioning aligns to a grid system, each character impression placed exactly where it should be, no indication of manual adjustment even with multi-layered sub-and-superscripts.
We don’t know how this could be. According to the experts, there were no typewriters or terminals in 1967, including the Selectric, that could have achieved this result. But according to our experts also, there is no way that this document could have been hand-typed by a human being using escape adjustments to place all the sub/superscripts… everything is just too uniform.
So… rather than trying to explain how this might be, we chose to document the phenomenon itself. It turns out that the individual typed characters in the dmr thesis conform precisely into a 1/12” by 1/12” grid. This pattern reveals itself when we overlay a mesh pattern onto the page.
It seems there is barely a mention of Dennis having the IBM 2741 terminal and then lots of theories about secretaries and others that would of typed it for him or the possibility he typed it himself.
I believe the thesis was probably printed using the IBM 2741 terminal. It’s a highly programable IBM Selectric Typewriter and It appears to support all of the needed features including the ability to notify the “server” side the Print Element (golf ball). It seems there would be a similar option to prompt the user to change the Print Element.
I haven’t confirmed how easy/hard it would be to move 1/2 lines up or down. Any idea if Dennis was mechanically or electronically inclined enough to modify the IBM 2741 to add buttons that would shift lines output line up or down by 1/2?
Hi James… sorry for delayed reply I have not been monitoring the site. I agree with you, I need to shift the focus to include the 2741 for consideration. What happened is that I got in touch with Jerry Saltzer and Tom van Vleck and hit them with this theory (Dennis worked at ProjectMAC and had his own CTSS account in grad school and at the labs, plus I have a vivid memory that Dennis had an IBM terminal printer (I remember the clacking ball) and WATS line in our basement. If anybody was set up to use a 2741 it would have been Dennis. the message I got from the science team was “don’t romance it if it isn’t true…”. I’ve got a better perspective now, there is a good story here…
Let me know if you’re open to talking more about this. I’m about to go back in and rebuild the site, I still have some open questions. Thx.