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A number of academics seem to have very simple HTML pages like this one. See Knuth's page for example. Most of the Comp Sci professors at my school had pages like this also.

Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long. A bit of CSS to set a max width and a margin and they'd be near-perfect.

Fortunately there's reader mode.

>> Only thing I don't like about reading them on a modern wide monitor is that the lines get too long.

It's HTML where the whole point is to reflow to fit your window. YOU determine the page width and the content reflows to fit.

The problem was when it took off and a bunch of publishers and print people came along and demanded control over the layout. Now they even have custom fonts FFS.

I grew up with simple HTML pages. I love them to death for this reason and others. I'm still very happy every time I come across one that seems to still be alive.

I'm sure it was done for a reason - popularity, A/B testing, money, an IMHO misguided sense of aesthetics - but personally, I definitely never asked for the "design"-ization of the web.

The real problem is viewport meta and how you have to opt in or opt out: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Viewport_m...

If you opt in, a simple page like this ends up looking pretty modern anyway, but plain, while if you opt out, your site is often rendered as if made for an older desktop monitor, like this one.

Another way of putting the problem, we preserved old desktop styles rather than invent new default responsive styles for touch-based browsers.

Without a standard like grey backgrounds and blue links to fall back on, websites had to start making decisions, especially when sites go responsive. At that point it is easier to invent new styles… there aren’t that many useful defaults to fall back on.

This is particularly true for HTML5 form controls, which rarely look good in any browser without styling…

But perhaps there’s hope for the future as new design language becomes HTML tags. E.g. details has an arrow, datalist builds a native autocomplete, and so on. It’s a shame that dialog doesn’t have native formatting tho, or that the idea of creating new, modern default styles hasn’t caught on yet in a cross-browser way.

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I don't know if all super simple pages are by good people but the reverse has lots of good examples to support it. https://bellard.org/ is another than comes to mind.

>Fortunately there's reader mode.

Yes, this. Given my older eyesight, having reader mode set to an easily legible larger size makes lots of simple web pages much more readable for me.

Why would some special mode be needed? I use ctrl+ to get a font size I like, then I set my browser window to a size where the text reflows to what I like. HTML is made to make it easy for the reader. And equally easy on mobile (phone, tablet)

Yeah, sometimes I use that for a site that is otherwise well formatted but the font is just small. For sites I visit often I just save that as a site specific preference so I do agree with you in some cases.

However, with reader mode it goes straight to my preferred font size, has nice margins, and basically everything is formatted in a very readable way. It still reflows and changes width with the window, but the rest of the formatting is better as well. I really hate text that goes right to the edges of the windows with no margins. Just a personal preference, but for me the quickest path to dramatically improved readability on some sites is reader mode.

Tbf, I HAVE encountered sites where zooming in makes it even less readable/prevents zooming/adjusts the font size to be roughly the same when you zoom in.

Yes, and that's why just HTML (without js unwished-for enforcement) is great.

I wish I could upvote you a thousand times. I hate it when pages have a fixed width -- that's what reflow is for. Let ME choose how I want to read the content.

Did you try resizing your window?

Sure, but I use a tiled window manager and normally have my browser on its own screen so it takes up the whole screen. Even with a narrower window, it's easier to read text when there's a margin also.

But like you say, not a really big deal. There's always reader mode, or local CSS overrides.

I like websites like this.

Simple fast, and, as you say, you can use reader mode.

Some people have blogs like this arguing that the user should have the power to customize his experience, for example, using a custom CSS. So they deliver plain html, with a very basic CSS sheet.

Apart from the point of reflow mentioned in sibling comments, it is also less distracting. I am not wowed by the beauty and cleverness of the CSS, so I'm actually paying 100% attention to the content.

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That's a feature, not a bug.

The apotheosis of Design is using a SPA that breaks your browser's functionality (tabs, back button, all that shit) while on the GNOME desktop. I.e., being in paradise.

Why reader mode?! It simply strips all styles and only retains contents. This webpage has no style, so reader mode should do nothing. If you see differences, it means your browser has different defaults for reader mode and normal mode. Choose which you like most and set it as default.

I suspect because reader mode has a reasonable max line lenght, and OP was complaining about that not being set on the page.

The wayback machine has snapshots of this, including one taken today, June 4. [1] I hope the current error is just something transient and will be resolved soon. I also hope someone has contacts for the website to alert them.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20230000000000*/https://www.bell...

What error are you seeing? I'm seeing the same page in the archive as on the live site.

If you reload it you'll get a periodic 503. It's not consistent.

I can see occassionally "503 Service Temporarily Unavailable" errors too. Also DMR's picture is "broken". Maybe the server is temporarily overloaded by the number of visits caused by this post. After all, it's an archived homepage and likely not running on the most performant webserver.

Don't worry, it's probably just the ol' HN hug o' death.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230115172142/https://www.bell-...

I did not receive any error.

He worked for bell labs since ‘67 before his death?

Wow, absolutely unheard of now. I’ll have to read a few of his papers now.

>I joined Bell Labs in 1967, following my father, Alistair E. Ritchie, who had a long career there. His most visible public accomplishment was as co-author of The Design of Switching Circuits, with W. Keister and S. Washburn; it was an influential book on switching theory and logic design just before the transistor era.

This and the part about Bell Labs transmogrifying around Richie through the years makes me wonder how many of Richie’s accomplishments were due to Bell and what could he have done outside of Bell on his own path? I’m thinking that living in an attic while accomplishing great CS feats is a delicate balance that might have only happened at Bell with his parents support. But is there another timeline where he sees the weaknesses at Bell and ends up somewhere else in Silicon Valley?

Bell Labs, JPL etc are part of a "lost" era of deep and broad research into CS, just like how NASA's push to the moon led to so many advancements still being used today. I dare say that the timeline of SVs and VC money, with focus on profit, has been the downfall of tech in the last decade or two (how many PhDs does it take to sell ads? There must be a joke about this...)

A lot of people would stay at Bell Labs because of the culture of frictionless internal collaborations. Don't know about SV, but my senior colleagues and managers all had multiple stories of fending off Universities recruiting their staff. Being reminded them of the freewheeling open-door nature of the place that Universities could not duplicate, a lot of sought-after people stayed put. Not to mention no committee work, grantwriting, or teaching.

But, the company fully expected to lose people to MIT, Berkeley, Caltech, Harvard, and other places. It was a point of pride that they could recruit young people of that caliber. Those who did choose to go usually left on good terms with Bell donating lab equipment and staying in touch for access to future students and postdocs.

Source: Physical sciences postdoc in the early 1990s before it went over the cliff and before SV became what it is today

The World would be a much better place if current-day companies practiced such a culture.

The way our current "Work Culture" is setup, it is destroying people's lives.

The Labs were a pressure cooker though. Not everyone was or could be a Ritchie, Thompson, Chu, or Stormer but that was the standard. Freewheeling research was only sustainable a when it had virtually unlimited funding due to the AT&T monopoly. When I got there in late 1990, the breakup had long since taken root and the culture was in flux. The AT&T business units were now being taxed to pay for R&D and they wanted returns on their investment. The VP of Research had also announced his intention to emphasize the software side (including math, CS, etc.) over hardware (physics, chemistry, materials, etc.)

The permanent members of technical staff in the physical sciences were under tremendous pressure to be both world-leading scientists while somehow being applied enough to help AT&T long distance fight off MCI and other competitors who had no R&D arms. There was no guidance on how to do this except "Well, work harder."

I will always be grateful to them for shielding me and the other postdocs from all the turmoil. It would have been very easy for them to say, "You're on your own" and look out for themselves but they always made time to talk to us and give us whatever support we needed. Needless to say, I miss that spirit.

Are you saying that these smart Bell Labs guys could be put to better use coming up with SW to more efficiently bombard you with ads? Because right now, that seems like the only thing making SV reliable money and the only thing that could support long term basic research... but doesnt.

Read awhile ago that another well known former Bell Labs CSRC member was the son of a Bell Labs researcher in the acoustics department.

It's fascinating to see how many modern distinguished researchers were fostered and mentored in their early lives through a familial & supportive environment which contributed in their path toward innovation; such a unique privilege shared by a diminishing cadre that were lucky enough to grow up in that vanishing analog world of black ties and a lifelong devotion to your research and work.

Why do we care? I think he is/was a genius and would have developed groundbreaking things anywhere, but why the “negative curiosity” and what-ifs? Why not instead celebrate his life and accomplishments instead of dwelling on what he might or mightn’t have done without certain advantages or luck? Did Bell write C for him? These kinds of comments drive me nuts. Downvote as you wish.

He mentions Plan 9. Reading that Wikipedia lead to the Inferno operating system. Which mentions a focus on portability and a file interface. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system)

That reminds me of web assembly and WASI.

So this is tangential but how is the component stuff in web assembly doing? It seemed like such a great idea to me but apparently, at least at one point, was somehow controversial or political.

Also, I wonder if it would be possible to port Inferno to web assembly.

Basically WebAssembly is anything but new.

You can also check Burroughs, Xerox PARC Workstations, USCD Pascal, Modula-2 MeDos, IBM AS/400, TenDRA, Taos, Oberon, among many others, that have had the idea of bytecode as portable OS binaries.

Though, wasm has a high level structure that makes it a clunky compilation target. The bytecodes above improve on wasm in that regard.

The high level structure is an advancement that is important for optimization.

It isn't; the first thing production optimizers do is throw it away.

It supposedly makes verification of SSA properties marginally faster, but that's not the bottleneck.

Specially to note is the history of C, where he acknowledges the issues with C and the creation of lint for static analysis (in 1979), or his proposal for fat pointers, that wasn't accepted by WG14.

"My undergraduate experience convinced me that I was not smart enough to be a physicist, and that computers were quite neat."

Thank god I am not the only one!

I started university in 1967, intending to study physics. Unfortunately, Physics was at 0830, and I soon discovered that I liked physics, but not enough to get to campus reliably at that time. Fortunately, Computer Science was at 1630. My academic career was thus determined.

In fairness, I'm not sure the return to society of minting another physicist is all that high. Many seem to go into computing anyway.

Well I think undergrad just stamps a label in your forehead. What you do in your free time, most important, what job you get and who seriously you jump into it is what determines your value to society.

Carsten Dominik, another physicist, was the creator of org-mode. I don't think physicist have an advantage over CS graduates, in fact reading code written by physicists is like watching and horror movie. But everyone can contribute a tiny bit.

You are right, a lot of my friends, who studied physics, take the jobs CS undergrads don't want to do, and get really low salaries...

I love the OtherUnix page.

There's a link to a Hungarian company called Unix Autó who have a product called InfoMix - which I initially scanned as Informix. That would've been a coincidence too far.

I see no mention of family beyond siblings. Was he not married/in a relationship? I realize some people don't want that, but it's always made me sad even so.

He reportedly was never in a relationship. This comes from unidentified members of the Ritchie family who set up a web site focussed mostly on his unpublished PhD thesis. The site includes some personal information on his life.

From https://dmrthesis.net/story-and-question/ (near the bottom)

"In his adult years Dennis had a reputation for being famously private.... There were topics that were completely off limits with Dennis – mostly having to do with any form of personal intimacy. This was true for his Bell Labs colleagues, who speak of Dennis’ personal life as a kind of private zone where they do not tread, and true with his siblings also. This was just his way.

"As an adult, Dennis lived an ascetic lifestyle. In September 1967, he moved back into the attic of his family home and set up a home office in the basement, where he lived with his parents until 1989. He worked from 1PM until 3AM six days a week, Sundays off for reading. He had no friends outside of his business colleagues, he rarely socialized, he did not have (nor never had) a relationship with anyone, he wouldn’t talk about/acknowledge discussion about emotional issues in any form. (He did have a wonderful family who loved him dearly and whom he loved dearly as well.) It was almost as if he needed to blot out any awareness of his personal life from the world by using the strategy of having no personal life to be observed.

"This affect wasn’t just something neutral, it could be an active force."

I should add, on the same page, there is an excerpt of an interview with his sister Lynn who set Dennis up with a friend for her junior prom. So he at least dated.

More broadly:

"As a youth Dennis was social and outgoing, then in young adulthood he transformed quite rapidly to become more private and anti-social. Hard to pin down exactly when this would have been happening… except that clues from John and Lynn’s interviews suggest perhaps sometime around February 1968 might be central."

>> become more private and anti-social.

It's a common mistake to say 'anti-social' instead of 'asocial'.

https://labs.kagi.com/fastgpt?query=what%27s+the+difference+...

Sounds lonely.

Sounds based.

Nothing on his Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Ritchie#Personal_life_a...

It does make me sad, because I know a lot of people who shelter themselves in computers, always wanting something more out in the real world but never being able to get their comfort zone wide enough to achieve it.

What happens when you phone the number?

Obligatory HN details:

- No CSS on the page

- No JS on the page

- Gif for image

- Static site hosted using Nginx and plain old /www folder

- For some reason, reasonably responsive on mobile

Did I miss anything ? Oh yea, superfast page load.