Daily Archives: 9/5/2009

Dennis Ritchie Home Page

Using Stumble Upon!, I, well, stumbled upon Dennis Ritchie’s page. He’s famous as the creator of C and an early influential developer of Unix. Back when I was in school, we all learned C by reading Kernighan and Ritchie’s The C Programming Language. His homepage has some nice papers about the history of Unix, as well as some others on topics like cryptography and programming language design. Great stuff.

Dennis Ritchie Home Page.

Nomograms

For some reason, I found myself looking at a rather pedestrian page about slide rules today, and it once again rekindled my interest in the closely related nomograms and nomography. I’ve mentioned them once or twice on this blog in the past, but in case you don’t know, nomograms are a computational aid from the past which were used for computation. In their most common form, they are a diagram with three separate scales, and by connecting a line between two variables, you can read off the third. They are an interesting and mostly forgotten relic from the past.

Now, I’ve particularly when interested in old technology, I imediately surf over to archive.org and see if they have any books for downoad about the subject. And, of course, they do!

Internet Archive: A first course in nomography.

You could also surf over to the PyNomo website and get their software for designing and printing nomograms.