Note that this is the “raw” log — to put it in context and make sense of the abbreviations, you need to read the actual paper named The Errors of TeX (1989, also reprinted in the book Literate Programming). The paper has DOI 10.1002/spe.4380190702 and Google search finds a copy here: https://yurichev.com/mirrors/knuth1989.pdf

At minimum, the abbreviations are also given in https://www.tug.org/TUGboat/tb10-4/tb26knut.pdf but the paper is much more. (Rehashing my comment from earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18177962)

Incidentally, some archives of the old TeX source code are available online... it might be an interesting project to combine the two, but I'm not finding the time to do it. If anyone is interested in helping / doing it, let me know. :-)

Here's the entry for 14 March 1978:

> Came in evening after sleeping most of day, to get computer at better time.

> Some day we will have personal computers and will live more normally.

Yes I suffered this too. In the 1980's it was all about terminal time. My undergrad college had thousands of terminals for 20,000 students - easy to get time. Grad school had 200 terminals for 20,000 students, with an elaborate electronic signup scheme and rationing. And that was Stanford! In Silicon Valley itself! I was vastly disappointed.

In case you didn't know, the source code of TeX itself is Pascal and published as a 500 pages literate programming tool which clearly is rendered with TeX, available at http://texdoc.net/texmf-dist/doc/generic/knuth/tex/tex.pdf#6...

If this was machine readable, then TeX could compile TeX ;-)

Why is this dated 1989, it starts in the 70s and through to this century.

Even as Svat says, you need a 1989 paper to make sense of it.

Reads like well written git commit messages.

If only you could write git messages like that... A lot of those messages would have to be shortened considerably to fit the 50 character summary.

It's annoying how frequently the shortest and best summary I can think of ends up at ~55 characters, and I have to omit important cotext or detail and include that in the body instead.

Why not just leave it at ~55 characters? 50 characters is not a hard limit. See the Linux commits, for example: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...