He has really nice handwriting.

Had, and many people think so. Somebody even made a TrueType font called Dijkstra (http://ufonts.com/fonts/dijkstra.html)

If you want to keep one, it is worthwhile to download it from a few sites; multiple variants exist. AFAIK the only difference between them is the character set (a couple of fractions, IIRC)

>His handwriting was so perfect and distinct that in the late 1980s Luca Cardelli, then from the DEC Systems Research Center, designed a ‘Dijkstra’ font for Macintosh computers. Soon after, Dijkstra received a letter typeset in this font and thought it was handwritten until news reached him about the creation of this font.

Ddsger Wybe Dijkstra (1930–2002): A Portrait of a Genius - CWI http://homepages.cwi.nl/~apt/ps/dijkstra.pdf

In elementary school I was thought to draw in roundhand variant. The problem I had felt for years was that I could either draw fast or readable, but never both. So a number of years ago I set out to consciously change my writing style. I decided 2 requirements: letter shapes had to be as simple as possible, preferably a single stroke, but still distinguishable (eg. u, v, r can look similar in a rush). In the end I tried to distill as pure and simple a style I could and it turns out my letter forms are near identical to Dijkstra's. This makes me wonder whether he was taught this handwriting or went through the same thought process, knowing his inclinations I would not be surprised if he did.

What is remarkable is that on a computer, you can reedit what to write to death. On a piece of paper, you have to get it right the very first time.

Only if it's your last sheet. ;-)

I've been known to… Well, no one knows it, but I have anyway practice-written letters that, shall we say, have been important to me to get right, trying out leadings and line breaks many times before writing out the out final version.

I thought so, too.

Many times I wondered how OSes relates to Conway's law:

    Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

Do OSes reflect the society that built these?

If we have "Operative Systems", are we ever get "Management Systems" or "Directive Systems"?

Operating systems do in fact frequently tend to expose internal organizational boundaries of the company that produces them.

This tends to be more obvious when you start looking at packaging, interface, or documentation where different teams responsible for providing different parts of the product provide components.

I saw "utexas" and "2001" and got really hopeful this was Dijkstra. Yay that it is indeed!

We'll put his name back in the title. (It was there before.)