A few years ago I looked reasonably hard for the study, with no luck. May well be that the report never saw the light of day outside of the Labs -- lots of stuff got written up and distributed internally that never got published outside. I wouldn't be surprised by studies that found higher percentages. IIRC, the test subjects at the Labs were people doing technical documentation who knew that how they were rated when it came around to performance review included a "how much text did you process?" component.

One of the other advantages for the troff approach at that time was version control -- the documentation folks could use the same system that the coders used.

Me, I'm an old geek (working on ancient) and have one of those 5-digit numbers. I learned text formatting on n/troff— and the preprocessors tbl, pic, and eqn— at Bell Labs in the late 1970s. Not up to TeX's standards for typesetting quality, but simpler to pick up quickly and ran in remarkably little memory. I still use groff and tbl to produce quick-and-dirty tables for throw-away documents because the defaults produce reasonably attractive results. There may be people who can do nice tight tables with text and numbers using Word, but I'm not one of them.

Fun to see just how many of the people that jump on a discussion like this one have 4- and 5-digit user numbers :^)

...no distractions while edition (MS GUIs suck)...

At some point there was an internal study at Bell Labs after WYSIWYG word processors were beginning to be available that found most people spent 20% of their time futzing with how the document looked instead of writing. Most of that time was wasted because subsequent changes were going to wipe out whatever the little tweaks had been intended to accomplish.

Interesting that today you can buy programs whose primary purpose is to blank all of your display except for a green-on-black mono-spaced text window. Sold as an aid for professional writers who need to pound out umpteen pages of text per day, so need to avoid interruptions and distractions while composing.

I can't really explain it other than to say "you get used to it." After a while, the markup becomes transparent...

Just like learning any other language, I suppose. Years ago I had a guy working for me who could do it with troff's pic preprocessor. He could "draw" lovely semi-technical diagrams of various sorts writing text in an editor in one window with a second window set up to render it when he clicked the mouse there. It didn't hurt that he had accumulated a whole library of code for drawing various shapes that he used frequently.

That is a way around the "problem" for the publishers.

Particularly when they convince the schools to include the e-book license fee as part of the cost of the class. "We don't care where you download the copy, we get paid regardless."

One thing possibly worth considering in the discussion is Intel's opening up foundry services on their 22 nm fab line. At least so far, the demand for Intel's own 22 nm parts isn't enough to keep the fab full. Ultimately, enough years down the road, we'll hit the point where there are so few people that need the faster/denser/whatever processor that those people won't be able to afford the prices that will have to be charged for those parts to cover the cost of operating the next-gen fab. No one (except possibly some governments) is going to spend $30B on a fab that sells only a few tens of thousands of parts per year.

It's not clear that, even without the executive branch's decision, continuing with Yucca Mountain was going to be easy. For the first time in pretty much a generation, in 2012 the SCOTUS ruled that there are things that the federal government can't force individual states to accommodate. The court might decide that taking even the perceived risks associated with transporting and storing large volumes of high-level nuclear waste is one of those things. The 1987 statutory change that said only Yucca Mountain could be studied was at least a little dodgy -- attached to a budget reconciliation bill in conference committee and never debated in Congress. There's some evidence that the hydrology at Yucca is more complex than originally believed. If Yucca Mountain got hauled back into court on state coercion grounds, there would be a lot of pressure to require the DOE to unseal the records on the clean-up at Rocky Flats in Colorado, which many people think was inadequate because of the government's subsequent behavior with regard to the "clean" site. The same sort of issue came up over the last few years when one of the tribes in Utah proposed using tribal lands as a "parking" site for dry cask spent fuel storage -- the utilities proposing that plan have abandoned it.

The American West has become much more populous, much more urban, and much more influential from an economic perspective since plans to locate the permanent waste site for (predominantly) eastern reactors in the West were originally floated.

The Ogallala "state" would be a disaster. Let's start with the name; the new state covers at best half of the High Plains/Ogallala aquifer, and three-quarters of the new state doesn't overlay the aquifer at all. For that area as a whole, far more surface water diversions are made than is withdrawn from the aquifer: the Red River diversions in North Dakota; the massive Missouri River diversions in Montana and South Dakota; the Platte River diversions in Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska; the Republican River diversions in Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. The eastern portion of "Shiprock" is much more dependent on the aquifer than Ogallala is.

The biggest problem, though, is that for purely population counting purposes, the Front Range portion of Colorado (dominated by Denver and its suburbs) has been attached to an enormous rural area with which Denver has little or no current cultural or economic tie. The only positive thing you can say about it is that Shiprock makes even less sense.

Having a real-time chat for office hours is a nice shiny toy, but it's not really useful for demonstrations or sketches.

One of my larger disappointments is the lack of good readily-available free multimedia conferencing. Checking my old lab notebooks, it's been a few months short of 20 years since I built multiple sets of prototype software for doing real-time audio, video, and a shared piece of paper over IP networks. When I was doing that, I really expected that within a decade we would have appropriate inexpensive I/O devices to make the paper part truly useful -- trying to write calculus equations or sketch a curve quickly really needs the feedback of a stylus on a surface where the drawing is visible under the stylus tip. And I expected IP multicast to be readily available, which helps a lot with multi-point distribution of the audio and video. I had real people at locations as far apart as Denver and Minneapolis using a version of the software very effectively over our corporate network, mostly sans video because there wasn't enough bandwidth. One of those users came to get me the day they were running a seven-way conversation using three copies of the application to give them three simultaneous sheets of paper (mostly cutting and pasting pieces of screen shots, then marking them up, with a record of the session going into a file). I thought, "Man, this is going to make a bunch of things a lot quicker and easier." Starting with office hours.

Like I said, one of the bigger disappoints in my technical career.

IE fiasco? Are you talking about the same "fiasco" where IE ended up with around 95% marketshare? Sounds like a raging success to me.

The same fiasco where, absent George W. Bush beating Al Gore (a result that would almost certainly have gone the other way if Ralph Nader had not been on the ballot in Florida and taken 3% of the vote) and changing the direction of the Justice Department, MS winds up as two companies -- an OS company and an application company, forbidden from cooperating. A business strategy that comes within an eyelash of getting your company broken up by the anti-trust people is a fiasco for management, at least IMO.

The anti-drug movement didn't need any help from those lobbies. The original anti-cannabis legislation was part of a wave of laws controlling narcotics in general, and didn't outlaw growing hemp for industrial purposes. Those narcotics laws were passed at least a decade before the US government report suggesting hemp could compete with wood for paper pulp was published. As it turns out, the report was inaccurate on several counts, and at least with the technology of the time (19-teens), hemp fibers were not price competitive with wood. The same sentiments that led to those narcotic control laws culminated 15 or so years later in the 18th amendment to the US Constitution, which banned production of beverages containing ethanol.

Just a nit, but clarinet is more like chording input -- multiple fingers change position at once. I assume that any sort of chording keyboard that recognizes particular combinations as entire words is illegal for typing competitions. Basic certification as a stenotype operator requires that you be able to do on the order of 180 words per minute. There's considerable dispute about the world record for stenotypes, but it's clearly in the 350-375 words per minute range, much higher than the record for character-at-a-time typists.

How else can you explain the infestations of Dogbert-style consultants, over-priced/under-performing product acquisitions, and expensive projects that fail more often than not in the larger enterprises? It's like they took all the money they saved by leveraging their synergies and went looking for ways to piss it away?

Not stupidity, perhaps, but rather difficulties with making the mental transition from "we're a start-up and everything depends on the share price increasing by leaps and bounds every year" to "we're a mature company." The only way to drive the share price is by growing revenues, hence the need to buy companies with existing products and customer bases. And to pump money into projects where there's demonstrated potential for high revenues (eg, MS could see how much money there was in game consoles, if only they could take the market share away from Sony and Nintendo). And God forbid that we share the profits with the shareholders by consistently paying a reasonable dividend -- we don't share profits, they'll have to make their money off the capital gains.

It's not free, but a student license isn't much more than the high-end calculators (at least at local bookstore prices) and it will do just about anything you can imagine needing up through at least calculus. Even the mobile or browser front ends that use a Wolfram server are damned good, so long as you have network connectivity.