I’ve recently come across the names of two women that were active during the birth and early days of Unix, back in 1970s and 1980s. For future reference, I wanted to note down information about these pioneering women.
“For many people, writing is painful and editing one’s own prose is difficult, tedious, and error-prone. It is often hard to see which parts of a document are difficult to read or how to transform a wordy sentence into a more concise one. It is even harder to discover that one overuses a particular linguistic construct. The system of programs described here helps writers to evaluate documents and to produce better written and more readable prose. The system consists of programs to measure surface features of text that are important to good writing style as well as programs to do some of the tedious jobs of a copy editor. Some of the surface features measured are readability, sentence and word length, sentence type, word usage, and sentence openers. The copy editing programs find spelling errors, wordy phrases, bad diction, some punctuation errors, double words, and split infinitives.”
“Computer aids for writers“, Lorinda Cherry, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, April 1981
Lorinda Cherry and Nina McDonald worked on Writer’s Workbench among other things in 1970s at Bell Labs. I wish the utilities that made up Writer’s Workbench would still be available and actively developed as free and open source software, maybe via GitHub (all I could find was this discussion on Hacker News).
According to M. Douglas McIlroy, Lorinda Cherry also contributed to another operating system: Plan 9.
The curious readers of history of computing can learn more about these women in the following online resources:
- Interview with Lorinda Cherry: This is a long interview, full of insights, wisdom and razor-sharp observations by a veteran who’s been there, done that.
- http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/precis/cherry1.htm
- Lorinda Cherry on Unix Guru Universe
- GNU plotutils manual – Appendix F History and Acknowledgements
- “Writing Tools“, IEEE Transactions on Communications ( Volume: 30, Issue: 1, January 1982)
- “Computer aids for writers“, ACM SIGPLAN Notices, April 1981
- Video: The UNIX System: Making Computers Easier to Use: “Hosted by Victor Vyssotsky in a Carl-Sagan-esque turtleneck sweater, the film includes Dennis Ritchie, one of UNIX’s inventors, along with Bell Labs staffers and programmers Brian Kernighan, Catherine Ann Brooks, Lorinda Cherry, Alfred Aho, Nina Macdonald, and John Mashey.”
- “A Research UNIX Reader: Annotated Excerpts from the Programmer’s Manual, 1971-1986” [PDF], by M. Douglas McIlroy
- Publications of Nina Macdonald
I think Lorinda Cherry also worked with Ken Knowlton, another important and inspiring historical figure when it comes to computing and innovation in many different fields.
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