Re: 10th anniversary of teTeX

>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Esser <[email protected]> writes:

  > teTeX's 10'th anniversary is in 3 days: http://tinyurl.com/6de5k

Congratulations.  10 years ago teTeX was really small, despite the 4MB
of documentation.

Well, I must admit that I came to teTeX not until winter 1995.  But
at this time teTeX was a matured system.  teTeX made use of the power
of UNIX, but today, UNIX programmers can learn a lot from teTeX.  I've
never seen another program which can be installed anywhere, mounted on
a remote host in an arbitrary directory, or even from a CD.

In July 1996 I joined the teTeX mailing list.  The first mail I
received was:

 > Subject: [TETEX 962] You are Gods
  
 > You are Gods.  teTeX built and ran the first time, and I tweaked the
 > deskjet metafont mode for 600 dpi in a few more hours.  Now I have a
 > printer that produces 300dpi laser-quality TeX output for US$200.
 > You've found the microwave for software.  I used to do Sysadmin at a
 > math department so I know whereof I speak.  You have my most complete
 > and total gratitude for putting this package together.

Note that he obviously couldn't imagine that all this was done by a
single person ("You are Gods").

What I enjoyed most about teTeX is that always everything works.  It
seems that Timothy Murphy agrees:

>>>>> "Timothy" == Timothy Murphy <[email protected]> writes:

  > Thomas's standards for stability are incredibly high.
  > I've never met any problem using so-called teTeX-beta's.

  > I imagine a footbridge designed by Thomas
  > would actually support 100-ton tanks.

And even Donald Knuth said:

 > Dear Thomas,
 > 
 > I want to express my appreciation for all the valuable time and
 > energy you have put into teTeX. When I switched to a Linux machine
 > in my Stanford office a few years ago, I was pleased to see that
 > TeX had been installed so intelligently --- even MetaPost worked well!
 > (Previously it had been quite an adventure to port MetaPost to
 > any new system, but now it was already there.) As a result I was able
 > to prepare the new editions of The Art of Computer Programming, Volumes
 > 1--3, entirely using teTeX; essentially all I had to do was add a bunch
 > of special fonts. I also used teTeX to make my books Digital Typography,
 > MMIXware, and (coming out next week) Selected Papers on Analysis
 > of Algorithms. Every pixel in those books was massaged by your system!
 > 
 > Now I am replacing the Sparc2 in my office at home by a new Linux
 > workstation, and I need teTeX even more --- because this is the computer
 > on which I will maintain the master sources for TeX and its friends.
 > At Stanford it was OK simply to work with a generic Linux provided
 > by system administrators, but at home I have to be the system admin
 > myself; therefore I now have to read the documentation much more carefully,
 > and I also need the source files normally omitted by RedHat.

Thomas, continue your work as you did in the past, you cannot imagine
how much people enjoy it.

Cheers,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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