We mentioned Lorinda Cherry in Dc, the venerable desktop calculator. Sadly, she died earlier this month. Here are various pointers to her life and work - she worked with Kernighan and co on early Unix tools.
Doug McIlroy posts an appreciation:
Lorinda Cherry, a long-time member of the original Unix Lab died recently. Here is a slightly edited reminiscence that I sent to the president of the National Center for Women and Information Technology in 2018 when they honored her with their Pioneer in Tech award.
…
Lorinda moved to my department in Computing Science when the Unix operating system was in its infancy. Initially she collaborated with Ken Knowlton on nascent graphics applications…She then joined the (self-organized) Unix team, collaborating on several applications with Bob Morris.
First came “dc”, an unlimited-precision desk calculator, which is still a Unix staple 45 years on. Building on dc, she would later make “bc”, which made unlimited precision available in familiar programming-language notation and became the interface of choice to dc.
Then came “form” and “fed”, nominally a form-letter generator and editor. In fact they were more of a personal memory bank, a step towards Vannevar Bush’s famous Memex concept–an interesting try that didn’t pay off at that scale. Memex had to sleep two more decades before mutating into the Worldwide Web.
Lorinda had a hand in “typo”, too, a Morris invention that found gross spelling mistakes by statistical analysis. Sorting the words of a document by the similarity of their trigrams to those in the rest of the document tended to bring typos to the front of the list. This worked remarkably well and gained popularity as a spell-checker until a much less interesting
program backed by a big dictionary took over.Taken together, these initial forays foretold a productive computer science career centered around graphics, little languages, and text processing.
In UNIX: Making Computers Easier To Use she talks about pipelines and scripts. (1982)
Here’s a transcript of an interview by Michael S. Mahoney, here talking about authorship forensic work:
we developed lots of tools for processing text in the process. And this led to some other statistical stuff that led to Typo, which is one of the early spell-checkers, really was a typo-checker. It worked based on trigram statistics. And there was some compression stuff based on trigram statistics also. And I can’t remember which came first, whether Typo came before the compression or if the compression made life to Typo. Way before Spell, again I could find a year on that. When Spell got good, Typo got dropped, although it still turned out to be a somewhat useful program.
MSM: For other reasons or other applications? The serendipity factor in Unix seems to be quite high.
Cherry: Yes, it is. Very high. And there was this flavor, other people probably talked about this, but it was group dynamics all going on up there. We were all up in the sixth floor.
Some mentions in Unix: An Oral History too:
Some of the Unix team’s tinkering, moreover, led to improvements in the new tools. Cherry’s self-described goal was to “see what kind of neat new things I can make the computer do.” Although Unix had used the text processor ed since its inception, Kernighan and Cherry improved not only the way ed performed its old functions, but created new functions for it.
The second project to assist with text processing was Brent Aker’s work on the Votrex machine, a peripheral that spoke for the computer. The Votrex did not intonate or emphasize properly. Cherry worked on a parts-of-speech program that would allow the computer to pronounce words properly. The computer needed “parts of speech …for syllabic stress.”
With the background of formatting, part of speech analysis and statistical filtering, Cherry embarked on the project Writer’s Workbench. As the “grandmother” of this new aid, Cherry created a word processor with the capacity to analyze style, determine readability and facilitate good writing.
Cherry expressed her vision of the Workbench’s use:
My feeling about a lot of those tools is their value in education um is as much pointing out to people who are learning to write that they have choices and make choices when they do it. They don’t think of a writing task as making choices per se. Once they get it on paper they think it’s cast in stone. So it makes them edit.
Lorinda Cherry also described the importance of a natural programming language, specifically in reference to eqn:
…the graphics is easy. The hard part is getting a language that you can teach to a math typist that will just flow off her fingertips to complicated graphics. I think the language part of that was what was neat about it. It’s still what’s neat about it.
The unique working conditions of the programmers led to a free exchange of ideas and complete access to information. Moreover, the close-knit environment led to certain standards of etiquette among the programmers. Cherry gives an example:
[T]here was this attitude that he who touched it last owned it. So if you needed
prto do somethingprdidn’t do, and you went and added it, you now ownedpr. And so if some other part of it broke, you owned it.
via HN (which put up a black banner, as it does on a notable death.)