[helmsb]

Fun fact: According to famed programmer Brian Kernigan: one day a colleague at Bell Labs was doing textual analysis on *The Federalist Papers* but it was proving challenging due to the full-text of the document being around 1mb—far more memory than most machines at the time.

Kernigan mentioned the dilemma To Ken Thompson—of Unix fame. The next day he came to work with a new program that could quickly find strings in a text document without having to load the entire document into memory. It became known as grep.

[vmilner]

Possibly because I’m not from the US, but the first thing I think of when hearing of the Federalist Papers is Mosteller’s work on deciding the disputed authorship using Bayesian techniques rather than the constitutional significance.

[umanwizard]

> Possibly because I’m not from the US

Indeed, the “federalist papers” are well-known to Americans as the documents being discussed in this article. Most Americans will have studied them in history class in school, or at least heard of them.