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E.W. Dijkstra Archive: Twenty-eight years (EWD1000)

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It was during a kind of scientific interregnum: my thesis and the basic software for the X1 had been completed and I could not start on the ALGOL compiler because ALGOL 60 had not been defined yet. I did all sorts of unrelated things. It was, for instance, the year that I published —at last!— my algorithms for the shortest path and the shortest spanning tree. It was also a time of explorations. At a given moment I was working on four or five different manuscripts. Of course, the pages of each manuscript were numbered; after I had mixed up pages between manuscripts for the second time, I decided that I had better end that confusion, and numbered the manuscripts as well: EWD0, EWD1, EWD3, EWD4 . And that is how it started. I don't remember their topics, nor whether they have been completed. The oldest EWD of which I remember the topic is EWD6, on which I worked in Paterswolde in the "Familiehotel", where, in the early summer, I spent a holiday with my young family. It was on my discovery

E.W. Dijkstra Archive: Twenty-eight years (EWD1000) EWD1000 Twenty-eight years Twenty-eight years ago I wrote EWD0. It was during a kind of scientific interregnum: my thesis and the basic software for the X1 had been completed and I could not start on the ALGOL compiler because ALGOL 60 had not been defined yet. I did all sorts of unrelated things. It was, for instance, the year that I published —at last!— my algorithms for the shortest path and the shortest spanning tree. It was also a time of explorations. At a given moment I was working on four or five different manuscripts. O

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