Name: Lorinda Cherry

Born: November 18, 1944

  • Computer programmer who worked at Bell Labs as an assembly language programmer (1972).
  • Co-authored eqn (part of the troff suite of Unix document layout tools). Also, co-authored several mathematical tools, including bc, which are still widely used.
  • She helped develop the dictionary for the Unix spell checker.

Significant publications

  • Typing Documents on the UNIX System: Using the -ms and -mcs Macros with troff.

Quotes

“My feeling about a lot of those tools is their value in education is as much pointing out to people who are learning to write that they have choices and make choices when they do it. They don’t think of a writing task as making choices per se. Once they get it on paper they think it’s cast in stone. So it makes them edit.”