It also brought typesetting to academic research, which means it's doing something that wasn't necessary before it arrived.

I was one of the last holdouts from a bygone era. I finished my dissertation in physics, in 1993. It's neither typeset, nor even in a computer readable form. Some fellow students were already using LaTeX by that point (mostly high energy physics, the slowest to graduate of the physics specialties) but I wasn't going to change my already obsolete tech stack within mere months of finishing.

I also have my parents' chemistry theses. They took handwritten manuscripts to a typist who banged out 4 copies at once using carbon paper. And then they entered their equations and figures by hand. (My thesis is hand corrected too). And their theses were short.

LaTeX did a lot of things for my fellow students, but it didn't make them finish quicker.

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throwaway_7274 5 hours ago | parent [-]

You wrote an analog thesis about 31 years ago, analog31? You've been playing the long game with this account!

Appreciate the story, thanks for sharing. Can I ask what your thesis was on (in whatever way isn't too personally-identifying if that's a concern)?

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analog31 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I anticipated this moment. ;-)

It was at a time of extremely rapid development of laser technology, where you built your own lasers to be at the cutting edge, which meant optics, electronics, and in my case, computer control plus data collection. I developed a method of increasing the signal-to-noise for a class of spectroscopy measurements by a factor of roughly 1000. This opened up a number of possible experiments involving otherwise weak effects.

My experiment produced some token physics results, but the method that I developed was really the point of it. A couple other labs used my setup, substituting more modern lasers as they became available. Meanwhile, I went into industry, and still work on measurement instrumentation today.

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throwaway_7274 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Good stuff, nothing but respect for that kind of work. AMO people are a different breed. Spending all day interpreting power spectral densities and tracking down ground loops takes a certain je-ne-sais-quoi. Literally. Last time I used a microwave amplifier I plugged it in with the wrong polarity and blew it up!

	▲	analog31 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		It probably required negative power for some unexpected reason. CMOS has spoiled us.