I started off with an SE/30, System 6.3.
System 7 and ResEdit were life-changing. Did DTP at MS Press for about 5 years which accounts for some of the books here.
One of my prize possessions is The New Hacker’s Dictionary, 1991 MIT Press. It’s in the middle of the second photo. Tons of technical terms, buzzwords, anecdotes:
Heisenbug /hi: zen-buhg/ [from Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of Bohr bug; see also mandelbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from either fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc arena) or errors that smash the stack.
(what!?!) and
RTM /R-T-M/ [USENET: acronym for Read The Manual’] 1. Politer variant of RTFM. 2. Robert T. Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988; villain to many, naïve hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris’s name on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.
Loved the term "buffer management” as applied to the use of a restroom.
Would love to know if anyone is familiar with Microsoft Bob, top photo.
While I posted a sub-section of my bookshelf showing my Inside Macintosh books (lower left corner), here’s the full picture of my “technical” bookcase:
The left shelf is programming and graphic design, the middle is writing-related, and the right side are mostly my own books (print editions of my Xojo programming magazine, xDev).
As soon as I saw the book, I exclaimed, “OMG! A Microsoft Bob book!” I doubt that I’ve consciously thought of Bob in at least twenty years. Somehow, my brain has kept a bunch of neurons around all this time, doing nothing but quietly storing memories of Bob.
I know Bob received a lot of criticism, but I think some of it isn’t really fair. It was inevitable that someone was going to try to build that kind of ultra-skeuomorphic interface at scale. Microsoft was neither the first nor the last to try it; it was just the most high-profile attempt. I miss the sense of experimentation that UI/UX design had in those days (as opposed to today’s design changes for the sake of making design changes), even if many of the experiments were failures.
It was fun to watch a few Microsoft Bob videos just now. There were moments when I saw a clear Hypercard influence on Bob, and others when I saw the influence of the original graphical AOL and eWorld clients on it. Strangely, I sometimes felt that walking into a virtual room and having floating windows appear wasn’t all that far away from…VisionOS, only built with thirty year-old technology.
The book on the shelf is At Home with MS Bob, a companion to a very simplified OS for PCs. Family oriented. I think Clippy was replaced by a little dog. I understand it was a project led by Melinda Gates. Never saw it in a store.
Every installation CD of Windows XP includes, as a cryptographic ballast for the product activation algorithm, multiple (multiply-encrypted) copies of the Microsoft Bob distribution image. It can’t be decrypted, but it’s there.
Here’s Dave Plummer (the guy who did it) talking all about it:
Since I moved from a 2400 sq ft house to a 1700 sq ft one 3 years ago, all my computer books are in the packing boxes - somewhere. However, I DID buy three new oak bookcases for my regular books overflow. Oh, and two for my LPs & LDs!
