>>>>> "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 -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
