On Sun, Dec 29, 2024 at 3:37 PM Warren Toomey <wkt@tuhs.org> wrote:

On Sat, Dec 28, 2024 at 05:53:48PM -0900, Royce Williams wrote:
> Someone I know is seeking the original version of an internal Bell Labs
> memo from 1974 titled "Webster's Second on the Head of a Pin" by Morris
> and Thompson. The topic appears to be related to improving the speed of
> lookups or search. It's cited in a few papers as "Unpublished Technical
> Memo, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 1974." All I can find online
> is citations. Any leads appreciated!

Doug McIlroy sent me a copy, it's now here:

https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Documentation/TechReports/Bell_Labs/PinheadWebster.pdf

Thanks Doug!

And many thanks from me and my colleague as well, Doug!

For future searchers, what follows is selected (unique) front matter from the memo, rewrapped slightly for Mailman width.

Title - Webster's Second on the Head of a Pin
Date - July 15, 1974
TM - 74-1271-13

Other keywords - words, text compression

Author Location Extension
Robert Morris MH 2C-524 3878
Ken Thompson MH 2C-523 2394

Charging case - 39199
Filing Case - 39199-11

ABSTRACT

We used the list of words from Webster's Second Unabridged Dictionary
(without definitions) as a test case for special purpose text
compression techniques.

We compressed it by a factor of 4.52 to 1.

The 234,932 words originally occupied 2,486,781 bytes and were
compressed into 549,388 bytes. The size of the decoding program is
1356 bytes.

The initial characters of a word that agreed with the initial
characters of the previous word were dropped and replaced by a code.
Common suffixes were also coded. Finally, a variable-length code was
used.

Pages Text 6 Other 0 Total 6

Royce