When Leslie Lamport (Turing Award 2013) started using Knuth’s TeX he started writing some macros for his own purposes. Knuth has always insisted that you should pronounce it /tɛk/. TeX is the abbreviation for τέχνη (techne) which means “art” and “craft”. The final solution was not ready until 1989! Knuth called this language TeX with each letter a capital Greek letters tau τ, epsilon ε and chi χ. He underestimated the complexity of the task. Knuth planned to spend his sabbatical year in 1978 to finish the project. Steve Jobs himself contributed to this topic. We are talking about the late seventies, when digital typesetting itself was a problem to be solved. He committed himself to design his typesetting system. When Knuth received the galley proofs he was disappointed. However, the second edition in 1976 had to be typeset again because the original fonts were no longer available. By then, books were printed using monotype settings. Donald Knuth (Turing Award 1974) published his first edition of The Art of Computer Programming in 1968 when he was thirty.

Free latex editor for word