My oldest computer book I won’t part with is Alan Simpson’s dBase III+ Programmer's reference guide, circa 1987. This book was transformative and allowed me to get a gig as a coder, so much self driven practice on a crappy underpowered generic clone PC. That crappy hardware was an advantage I didn’t see at the time, having to think about routines that were fast enough based not because of faster disks and tons of RAM.
Do I need this book? Not so much. But it brings me joy carefully flipping through it on occasion.
Skimming this and thoroughly enjoying it, back in the mid to late 80s I worked in London's phototypesetting industry mostly serving ad agencies and others who needed high quality, quick turnaround type. I didn't work with Monotype, all Berthold, but it looks like they were all in a similar place.
Check out the Cold Type section on this page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berthold_Type_Foundry#Cold_T... . What was fascinating about this is it wasn't laser produced type, it came from a serious of glass grids and prisms. Laser output at the time was awful and nowhere near production quality but this prism-based output could only scale from 4pt to 36pt(? or somewhere thereabouts). That said, because the type was photo perfect it could be put under a camera enlarger and blown up to over 96pt in the hands of a skilled operator.
More notable things, these machines couldn't set type on an angle so as you were composing you had to take into consideration giving the paste up artist enough dance room to work. Spell check? Nope.
The biggest one was it was all markup language and nobody really used visual rendering, you set it all in your head and sometimes you'd even get it right on the first try. There were visual rendering units but they were slow, inaccurate, and would _really_ slow you down in an industry where the faster you were the more money you made. This markup thinking made being creative with HTML tables a natural skill in '92 so it wasn't all for nothing.
The Mac finally got PageMaker, photo paper laser output became good enough, and the last Berthold machines I saw were Sun workstations where I got my first taste of Unix. Fancy expensive kit where the rendering was fast enough to be useful.
I turned this on as well and all I've had are a few false positives when running up stairs or similar. Good feature and id rather have to unlock occasionally than error the other way.
Like that there's no ads but it's a big no on the "data shared with third parties". Assuming this is how they make money? I'd rather wait 10 more mins for the bus I just missed.
I had one of these and I think I bought it from Staples, Office Depot, or whatever the predecessor to this was. I can't remember the exact timing but I picked up an IBM Simon around the same time.
Both were half baked products that ended up in a drawer after a couple of weeks. The EO had lousy battery life and not as good as pen and paper for note taking which is why I wanted it.
I had various devices over that time frame which included the Palm Pilot, Sony Magic Link, all of the Newtons, a Sharp Zaurus, and so on. The one that really stuck was the Psion MX5 as I could actually touch type on it.
It's a little anecdotal as nobody was really writing history down at that point but it feels about the right timing.
The first time the FTP server I ran got broken into was about then, it was a shock as why would some a-hole want to do that? I wasn't aware until one of my users tipped me off a couple of days after the breach. They were sharing warez rather than porn at least, having the bandwidth to download even crappy postage stamp 8 bit color videos back then would take you hours.
When this happened I built the company's first router a few days later and put everything behind it. Before that all the machines that needed Internet access would turn on TCP/IP and we'd give them a static IP from the public IP range we'd secured. Our pipe was only 56k so if you needed it you had to have a really good reason. No firewall on the machines. Crazy, right?
"Here a busy New Yorker *can book a 5 minute time slot*, pay for a hat, stand in a spot under my window for 3 seconds, have a hat put on their head, and get on with their extremely important, extemely busy day all within a single New York minute."
Got mine in 2017 from their Indiegogo launch and as a previous 5mx user in the 90s how could I not?
Sadly they never updated the OS so it's not really much use now. The inability to make some android apps flip to landscape was also a little frustrating.
"But because juvenile convictions in Finland don’t count towards determining whether somebody is a first-time offender, Kivimäki will end up serving approximately half of his sentence."