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by wglb 473 days ago
When I bought the first volume in about 1969, I vowed to read that one, and then each one that followed.

However, that is yet to come to pass.

However, when we at Mark Williams Company writing the floating point routines for the C compiler (https://winworldpc.com/product/mark-williams-letsc/3x), we were heavily reading Chapter 4, particularly on long division.

Also did spend some time in the Random Number generation chapter.

An interesting difference between my 1965 version and the ones published today is that long multi-page foldout in Sorting and Searching showing tape-based merge sort is no longer part of the book.

3 comments

Hey, I have a question about the Mark Williams Company. I understand it was founded by Aaron Swartz's father. Did he work on the programming? Did Aaron spend time around the office? I'm curious how Aaron first got involved in programming, which I think was probably long after the company.
Aaron was very young during the Mark Williams years. I worked there for six years. I don’t think he visited the office during its heyday. So yes long after MWC.
Thank you! Did his father write code?
Not very much. There were a handful of Waterloo kids that are next level programmers.
I was gifted the new set this last Christmas after losing my old versions in a fire, the fold out pages are there in the latest release.

Edited to add: Amazon often has fake or at least printed with lower quality/cost versions. It was hard to find a real copy of his concrete math book when I was searching. The 'i18n' edition is printed on the cheapest of cheap paper for that book. I suspect that is related. But the fan-out pages are in the sorting volume.

#2 Vol 3 is on the second edition, with the tape merge fanout between pages 338 and 339. So it would be a particular printing that didn't have it.

I double checked my latest volume and it does the foldout. My error
I was mistaken about the foldout. It is in both versions. My error.