3 ms·

1987 was the year I first got access to Usenet (via FidoNet). It's interesting to think how long it would take to download a 30MB book at the time. Of course

1987 was the year I first got access to Usenet (via FidoNet). It's interesting to think how long it would take to download a 30MB book at the time. Of course it would have been considerably smaller since it would have probably been a text file or perhaps LaTeX. When a CS book is relevant this long, I feel like these kind of ruminations put me in the right headspace to receive it.

iheartmemcache 11y ago
That was right around the time that T1 drops were coming to hospitals and universities (my father was faculty at Harvard/BIDMC at the time). In the latter part of the '87s I was still a few embryonic cells, but as a true nerd, I'd barrage my fathers colleagues with questions about technology and infrastructure in my teenage years. This was the era of UUCP and .TeX files, with a bit of PS here and there (for final presentation; not for transfer). A few years later, Gopher would have been the prime medium of exchange before the NCSA implementation of HTTP went around like wildfire. Side-note: I was listening to an interview with an EE who drafted textbooks at (I want to say, though I might be wrong) UC Berkeley during the 70s. He mentioned the reason why his original first few editions had no diagrams was because getting access to the resource (they only had one resource on staff for the dept for this purpose) to assist in typesetting was so hard, you'd have months, sometimes years of wait-time. I wish I still had contact with the greybeards who were publishing then of my fathers generation to ask them what the procedure was when they would submit papers for publication and/or press. Edit: https://www.academia.edu/13067316/T1_Historical_Timeline_of_the_Internet https://www.academia.edu/13067316/T1_Historical_Timeline_of_... So presumably that NSFnet timeline (~1986) is when you had academics gaining access to static routed internet, ARIN giving out netblock allocations, etc. I'd imagine post-docs and grad students fighting over VAX/VMS time like modern day post-docs battle over NMR access these days.
vanderZwan 11y ago
Well, there's a perfectly fine 6MB djvu file - only one fifth the infinite download time!
- Maken 11y ago
  Also, as the page states it can be text-searched. A version not consisting on scanned pages would be neat, but I guess the author lost the sources long time ago.

iheartmemcache 11y ago

That was right around the time that T1 drops were coming to hospitals and universities (my father was faculty at Harvard/BIDMC at the time). In the latter part of the '87s I was still a few embryonic cells, but as a true nerd, I'd barrage my fathers colleagues with questions about technology and infrastructure in my teenage years. This was the era of UUCP and .TeX files, with a bit of PS here and there (for final presentation; not for transfer). A few years later, Gopher would have been the prime medium of exchange before the NCSA implementation of HTTP went around like wildfire. Side-note: I was listening to an interview with an EE who drafted textbooks at (I want to say, though I might be wrong) UC Berkeley during the 70s. He mentioned the reason why his original first few editions had no diagrams was because getting access to the resource (they only had one resource on staff for the dept for this purpose) to assist in typesetting was so hard, you'd have months, sometimes years of wait-time. I wish I still had contact with the greybeards who were publishing then of my fathers generation to ask them what the procedure was when they would submit papers for publication and/or press. Edit: https://www.academia.edu/13067316/T1_Historical_Timeline_of_the_Internet https://www.academia.edu/13067316/T1_Historical_Timeline_of_... So presumably that NSFnet timeline (~1986) is when you had academics gaining access to static routed internet, ARIN giving out netblock allocations, etc. I'd imagine post-docs and grad students fighting over VAX/VMS time like modern day post-docs battle over NMR access these days.

vanderZwan 11y ago

Well, there's a perfectly fine 6MB djvu file - only one fifth the infinite download time!

Maken 11y ago
Also, as the page states it can be text-searched. A version not consisting on scanned pages would be neat, but I guess the author lost the sources long time ago.