From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.0 required=5.0 tests=MAILING_LIST_MULTI, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 19621 invoked from network); 16 Feb 2022 08:04:30 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (45.79.103.53) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 16 Feb 2022 08:04:30 -0000 Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id B6A769D04F; Wed, 16 Feb 2022 18:04:28 +1000 (AEST) Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 035ED9D036; Wed, 16 Feb 2022 18:02:50 +1000 (AEST) Received: by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix, from userid 112) id B6DF69D036; Wed, 16 Feb 2022 18:02:46 +1000 (AEST) Received: from firemail.de (firemail.de [88.99.137.45]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 80EE09D035 for ; Wed, 16 Feb 2022 18:02:43 +1000 (AEST) Received: from firemail.de (127.0.0.1 [127.0.0.1]) by firemail.de (b1gMailServer) with ESMTP id 346F19C6 for ; Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:02:41 +0100 (CET) Date: Wed, 16 Feb 2022 09:02:41 +0100 MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: X-Mailer: b1gMail/7.4.0 X-Sender-IP: 93.209.198.79 From: "Thomas Paulsen" To: "Douglas McIlroy" In-Reply-To: References: Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Content-Disposition: inline X-Abuse-Report: abuse@emailn.de Subject: Re: [TUHS] Lorinda Cherry X-BeenThere: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.26 Precedence: list List-Id: The Unix Heritage Society mailing list List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Reply-To: Thomas Paulsen Cc: tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org Errors-To: tuhs-bounces@minnie.tuhs.org Sender: "TUHS" I didn't know that. R.I.P great programmer! --- Urspr=C3=BCngliche Nachricht --- Von: Douglas McIlroy Datum: 15.02.2022 23:31:03 An: TUHS main list Betreff: [TUHS] Lorinda Cherry 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