Re: [TUHS] Lorinda Cherry

[George Michaelson <ggm@algebras.org>]

I wrote a major part of the UQ phone directory in EQN, to post process
T/Roff output so the existing bromide-mechanical printing braces for
grouping common phoneline holders could be done in the new
phototypesetter. Eqn was the tool which got me out of a self-dug hole
over-promising delivery of "print-equivalent" outcome here.

I use BC as a daily driver like most people. I never quite got DC, and
wondered at the duality of them. Very interesting to have the
background explained.

The trigraph spelling checker sounds wonderful.

Thanks for posting this.

_G

On Wed, Feb 16, 2022 at 8:35 AM Douglas McIlroy
<douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> As Lorinda Cherry's longtime colleague at Bell Labs, I was
> very pleased to hear she has been chosen for the NCWIT Pioneer
> Award. At the risk of telling you things you already know,
> I offer some remarks about her career. I will mainly speak of
> things I saw at first hand when our offices were two doors
> apart, from the early '70s through 1994, when Lorinda left
> Bell Labs in the AT&T/Lucent split. Most of the work I describe
> broke new ground in computing; "pioneer" is an apt term.
>
> Lorinda, like many women (including my own mother and my wife),
> had to fight the system to be allowed to study math and science
> in college. She was hired by Visual and Acoustics Research
> at Bell Labs as a TA--the typical fate of women graduates,
> while their male counterparts were hired as full members of
> technical staff. It would take another decade for that unequal
> treatment to be rectified. Even then, one year she received
> a statement of benefits that explained what her wife would
> receive upon her death. When Lorinda called HR to confirm that
> they meant spouse, they said no, and demanded that the notice
> be returned. (She declined.) It seemed that husbands would not
> get equal treatment until AT&T lost a current court case. The
> loss was a foregone conclusion; still AT&T preferred to pay
> lawyers rather than widowers, and fought it to the bitter end.
>
> 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:
> Beflix, a system for producing artistically pixillated films,
> and an early program for rendering ball-and-stick molecular
> models.
>
> 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.
>
> By connecting a phototypesetter as an output device for Unix,
> Joe Ossanna initiated a revolution in document preparation. The
> new resource prompted a flurry of disparate looking documents
> until Mike Lesk brought order to the chaos by creating a macro
> package to produce a useful standard paper format.
>
> Taking over from Lesk, Lorinda observed the difficulty of
> typesetting the mathematics (which the printing industry counted
> as "penalty copy") that occurred in many research papers,
> and set out to simplify the task of rendering mathematical
> formulas, Brian Kernighan soon joined her effort. The result
> was "eqn", which built on the way people read formulas aloud
> to make a quite intuitive language for describing display
> formulas. Having pioneered a pattern that has been adopted
> throughout the industry, eqn is still in use forty years later.
>
> Lorinda also wrote an interpreter to render phototypesetter
> copy on a cathode-ray terminal. This allowed one to see
> typeset documents without the hassle of exposing and developing
> film. Though everyone has similar technology at their fingertips
> today, this was genuinely pioneering work at the time.
>
> You are certainly aware of Writers Workbench, which gained
> national publicity, including Lorinda's appearance on the Today
> Show. It all began as a one-woman skunk-works project. Noticing
> the very slow progress in natuaral-language processing, she
> identified a useful subtask that could be carved out of the
> larger problem: identifying parts of speech. Using a vocabulary
> of function words (articles, pronouns, prepositions and
> conjunctions) and rules of inflection, she was able to classify
> parts of speech in running text with impressive accuracy.
>
> When Rutgers professor William Vesterman proposed a
> style-assessing program, with measures such as the frequencies
> of adjectives, subordinate clauses, or compound sentences,
> Lorinda was able to harness her "parts" program to implement
> the idea in a couple of weeks. Subsequently Nina MacDonald,
> with Lorinda's support, incorporated it into a larger suite
> that checked and made suggestions about other stylistic issues
> such as cliches, malapropisms, and redundancy.
>
> Another aspect of text processing that Lorinda addressed was
> topic identification. Terms (often word pairs) that occur with
> abnormal frequency are likely to describe the topic at hand. She
> used this idea to construct first drafts of indexes. One
> in-house application was to the Unix manual, which up until
> that time had only a table of contents, but no index. This
> was a huge boon for a document so packed with detail.
>
> In her final years at Bell Labs, Lorinda teamed up with AT&T
> trouble-call centers to analyze the call transcripts that
> attendants recorded on the fly--very sketchy prose, replete
> with ad-hoc contractions and misspellings. The purpose was
> to identify systemic problems that would not be obvious from
> transcripts considered individually. When an unusual topic
> appeared at the same time in multiple transcripts, those
> transcripts were singled out for further study. The scheme
> worked and led to early detection of system anomalies. In one
> case, it led AT&T to suspend publication of a house organ that
> rubbed customers the wrong way.
>
> Lorinda was not cut from the same mold as most of her
> colleagues. First she was a woman, which meant she faced
> special obstacles. Then, while there were several pilots
> among us, there was only one shower of dogs and only one car
> racer--moreover one who became a regional exec of the Sports
> Car Club of America. For years she organized and officiated
> at races as well as participating.
>
> Lorinda was always determined, but never pushy. The
> determination shows in her success in text analysis, which
> involves much sheer grit--there are no theoretical shortcuts
> in this subject. She published little, but did a lot. I am
> glad to see her honored.
>
> Doug McIlroy