25 Sep
2015
25 Sep
'15
2:07 a.m.
Writers' Workbench was unusual enough (word processing was
very new in the outside world) that Lorinda and one of her co-authors were
interviewed on the Today show. She was asked if the program would suggest
using Ms. instead of Miss (much under discussion at the time). As I
recall, she ducked the question gracefully.
-- Lorinda Cherry (llc) worked at Bell Labs. She
wrote diction (and
the rest of the Writer's Workbench tools) there, in the early
1980s; if some people saw it first in BSD releases that is just
an accident of timing (too late for V7) and exposure (I'm pretty
sure it was available in the USG systems, which weren't generally
accessible until a year or two later).
Lorinda is one of the less-known members of the original Computer
Science Research Center who nevertheless wrote or co-wrote a lot
of things we now take for granted, like dc and bc and eqn and
libplot.
Checking some of this on the web, I came across an interesting
tidbit apparently derived from an interview with Lorinda:
http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/frs122/precis/cherry2.htm