Your feature article in the December issue re: the role of secretaries at Princeton University brought back memories.
As a chemical engineering grad student writing up his Ph.D. thesis in mid-1975, the departmental secretaries were as important to me as my thesis adviser. I could type (had to — my handwriting as a lefty was awful), but nowhere near the level of proficiency needed to create an acceptable 100-page doctoral dissertation for my committee. The secretaries had a great side hustle turning illegible, hand-written manuscripts into acceptable dissertations ... all it took was about 1-2 weeks and a very modest fee.
But even in these technical Dark Ages, word processing technology was moving ahead! The real jocks used the University’s IBM 360 mainframe and daisy-wheel printer to produce their theses, using a primitive program named ROFF. These pioneers typed their thesis on punch cards, where spacing and paragraphs had to be identified and ROFF did the rest, more or less. And, once every hour, a White ROFF run was initiated, using white computer paper instead of the cheaper stock. This was for the grad students who debugged their ROFF decks, and created a chaos of jostling students.
For guys of my age — 76 — we saw the evolution from Underwood manual typewriters, to IBM Selectrics, to ROFF, to Wang Word Processors, to today’s MS Word on PCs. What a trip it has been!
Your feature article in the December issue re: the role of secretaries at Princeton University brought back memories.
As a chemical engineering grad student writing up his Ph.D. thesis in mid-1975, the departmental secretaries were as important to me as my thesis adviser. I could type (had to — my handwriting as a lefty was awful), but nowhere near the level of proficiency needed to create an acceptable 100-page doctoral dissertation for my committee. The secretaries had a great side hustle turning illegible, hand-written manuscripts into acceptable dissertations ... all it took was about 1-2 weeks and a very modest fee.
But even in these technical Dark Ages, word processing technology was moving ahead! The real jocks used the University’s IBM 360 mainframe and daisy-wheel printer to produce their theses, using a primitive program named ROFF. These pioneers typed their thesis on punch cards, where spacing and paragraphs had to be identified and ROFF did the rest, more or less. And, once every hour, a White ROFF run was initiated, using white computer paper instead of the cheaper stock. This was for the grad students who debugged their ROFF decks, and created a chaos of jostling students.
For guys of my age — 76 — we saw the evolution from Underwood manual typewriters, to IBM Selectrics, to ROFF, to Wang Word Processors, to today’s MS Word on PCs. What a trip it has been!