
How SHRDLU got its name (2003) - YeGoblynQueenne
http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/name.html
======
rmccue
If you've not seen it, the documentary Farewell Etaoin Shrdlu of the final
days of Linotype at the NY Times is great:
[https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu](https://archive.org/details/FarewellEtaoinShrdlu)

~~~
awiesenhofer
A wonderful documentary! Although I also loved seeing the old, huge but
beautiful 70ies computers at the end that replaced the linotypes.

------
acqq
Relevant, by Peter Norvig "Mayzner Revisited or ETAOIN SRHLDCU":

[https://norvig.com/mayzner.html](https://norvig.com/mayzner.html)

What I haven't found is _the technical reason why_ the most frequent letters
had to be at the start in Linotype machine keyboards.

The title article says "for physical reasons, which would take longer to
explain." I don't care how long it would take, I'd like to know. I guess it's
something like having the handling of the more frequent case earlier in the
assembly code, but the details are important.

Does anybody know the answer?

~~~
mikequinlan
Possibly
[https://www.circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/compli...](https://www.circuitousroot.com/artifice/letters/press/compline/history/linofaq/index.html#why-
etaoin)

Section 3.2. Why the "etaoin" Keybaord?

~~~
acqq
That's exactly what I needed, many thanks. The author there also discusses
other rationales which he considers later invented excuses, not the real
reason, then shows what he believes to be the original idea. Once having this
I've also found a shorter summary by the same author:

"It evolved during the development of the machine later called the “Blower”
Linotype, which entered production in 1886. In this machine, the magazine
consisted of a set of rectangular tubes set vertically (and permanently) in
the machine. Mergenthaler knew that he would need to supply matrices in
varying numbers, and he knew the frequency of the letters (stories that he
asked for a count to be done are dubious - typefounders and printers had known
the letter frequencies for centuries). But he was worried that the matrices
might be damaged by their fall through these vertical tubes. For the most-used
matrices (e, t, a, …) this was not really a problem, since they were supplied
in greater numbers and would tend to fill their tubes a bit more (limiting the
distance of their fall). But for the less-used mats (supplied in fewer
numbers) he feared a problem. So he arranged the tubes in decreasing lengths
and put the most frequent characters to the left. The layout of the magazine-
tubes led directly to the layout of the keyboard below them. We know this
because he said so in US patent 378,798 (filed 1886-07-17, issued 1888-02-28):
“… If long tubes were used with a smaller number of matrices at their lower
ends, each matrix would acquire a considerable velocity in falling to its
place in the tube. This would tend to lead to the mutilation of the matrix.”
(p. 3)

In the 1890 machine later known as the “Square Base” Linotype, Mergenthaler
introduced a different solution to this - the inclined magazine, which avoided
matrix freefall in the magazine. But he kept the “etaoin” layout."

(From [http://www.briarpress.org/40298](http://www.briarpress.org/40298) A
comment by David M MacMillan on 7 Sep 14)

Now the only thing missing is the scanned "US patent 378,798" which seems to
be too old to be accessible?

Edit: Found!
[https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/documents/ottmar-m...](https://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/documents/ottmar-
mergenthaler-machine-for-producing-type-bars-patent/)

------
etaioinshrdlu
I feel so relevant today, although I realize I fat fingered an extra 'i' years
ago...

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imglorp
Related question: Does anyone have a working SHRDLU to play with? The original
code has been posted but it's Maclisp, so it probably needs porting or
emulation and a little packaging. Also, I think the (blocks world)
visualization layer is somewhere else?

[https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu](https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Like dTal says there's a java version and also a windows cmd version but
neither seems to be very stable. In general, it's rather a bit sad, but it
seems that Terry Winograd's original code is going to be very hard to run- and
has been changed by at least one of his doctoral students anyway. It seems
that Winograd had to make changes to the Lisp runtime to get SHRDLU running as
he wanted it for his thesis, changes that were not entirely backported to the
code of SHRDLU later:

 _[Dave McDonald] (davidmcdonald@alum.mit.edu) was Terry Winograd 's first
research student at MIT. Dave reports rewriting "a lot" of SHRDLU ("a
combination of clean up and a couple of new ideas") along with Andee Rubin,
Stu Card, and Jeff Hill. Some of Dave's interesting recollections are: "In the
rush to get [SHRDLU] ready for his thesis defense [Terry] made some direct
patches to the Lisp assembly code and never back propagated them to his Lisp
source... We kept around the very program image that Terry constructed and
used it whenever we could. As an image, [SHRDLU] couldn't keep up with the
periodic changes to the ITS, and gradually more and more bit rot set in. One
of the last times we used it we only got it to display a couple of lines. In
the early days... that original image ran like a top and never broke. Our
rewrite was equally so... The version we assembled circa 1972/1973 was utterly
robust... Certainly a couple of dozen [copies of SHRDLU were distributed].
Somewhere in my basement is a file with all the request letters... I've got
hard copy of all of the original that was Lisp source and of all our
rewrites... SHRDLU was a special program. Even today its parser would be
competitive as an architecture. For a recursive descent algorithm it had some
clever means of jumping to anticipated alternative analyses rather than doing
a standard backup. It defined the whole notion of procedural semantics (though
Bill Woods tends to get the credit), and its grammar was the first instance of
Systemic Functional Linguistics applied to language understanding and quite
well done." Dave believes the hardest part of getting a complete SHRDLU to run
again will be to fix the code in MicroPlanner since "the original MicroPlanner
could not be maintained because it had hardwired some direct pointers into the
state of ITS (as actual numbers!) and these 'magic numbers' were impossible to
recreate circa 1977 when we approached Gerry Sussman about rewriting
MicroPlanner in Conniver." _

[http://maf.directory/misc/shrdlu.html](http://maf.directory/misc/shrdlu.html)

Even the link to the account by Dave McDonald above, is itself subject to
linkrot.

~~~
imglorp
That's what I was hoping for, thank you. At least someone is trying to get it
curated and working for the future.

------
ColinWright
The story by Frederic Brown that the article mentions:

[https://www.you-books.com/book/F-Brown/Etaoin-Shrdlu](https://www.you-
books.com/book/F-Brown/Etaoin-Shrdlu)

~~~
dhosek
Thanks, I was disappointed that the link in the article wasn't to the actual
story.

------
khazhoux
SHRDLU in linotype keyboard

[https://media.wired.com/photos/5934fefaa88f414d9a8cbb48/mast...](https://media.wired.com/photos/5934fefaa88f414d9a8cbb48/master/w_600,c_limit/0703_dayintech_full.jpg)

------
dang
I added 2003 because of
[https://web.archive.org/web/20031105035016/http://hci.stanfo...](https://web.archive.org/web/20031105035016/http://hci.stanford.edu/winograd/shrdlu/name.html).
It might be earlier of course.

~~~
dredmorbius
The page was written using Adobe PageMill 3.0, which was released in 1998 and
discontinued in 2000
([https://winworldpc.com/product/pagemill/30](https://winworldpc.com/product/pagemill/30)),
and references a Michael Quinion "Wierd Words" page created September 2, 2000
([https://web.archive.org/web/20031202154745/www.quinion.com/w...](https://web.archive.org/web/20031202154745/www.quinion.com/words/weirdwords/ww-
eta1.htm)) which might narrow down the range a bit further.

GWS suggest February, 2001, as I see it:

[https://www.google.com/search?q="How+SHRDLU+got+its+name"&hl...](https://www.google.com/search?q="How+SHRDLU+got+its+name"&hl=en&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1995%2Ccd_max%3A2002&tbm=)

I've done worse:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23203180](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23203180)

