Dick Lipton on Gödel’s Lost Letter and P=NP: Knuth began to explain how he wrote the first version of TeX. My faculty colleagues began to become more and more uncomfortable as Knuth spoke. The high level version of what he said was:
I sat down and started to type in the entire program in Pascal. After X hours the entire system was entered. Then I tried to compile it all. After fixing a few syntax errors the system compiled. I then tried to typeset a sample piece of TeX. Again after fixing a few errors I got this all to work...
