> "Back when the original Whole Earth Catalog was having a heyday in the mid-70s, two products were introduced which we recommended heartily. One was the Vermont Castings wood stove, the other was the Apple personal computer. Both cost a few hundred dollars, both were made by and for revolutionaries who wanted to de-institutionalize society and empower the individual, both embodied clever design ideas and good business sense, and both became famous successes."
> "A 'hacker,' in the emerging definition, is anyone who pushes the edges of the possible and permissible. In Signal are techniques for hacking English, music, audio cassettes, postcards, rubber stamps, video, diagrams, robots and the nervous system, to name a fraction of the myriad represented here. In all of these realms the distance to the edge is not far, and the distance from one to another is no distance at all."
Signal was one of the Whole Earth Catalog publications of the 1980s.
As an exemplar of curation and selection, as well as pressaging ... a huge amount of ... the current technological and online domain, it's hard to beat.
It seemed to briefly appear online (possibly at the Internet Archive), but disappeared again. It's now at LibGen.
Just twenty pages in, the selection of books and references is already pretty staggering (and contains numerous of my own choices and faves from the period).
Oddly: an argument for expertise and selection rather than the more popular trends of today of "crowdsourcing" and "collaborative filtering" everything. There's probably a balance between these poles.
> "Back when the original Whole Earth Catalog was having a heyday in the mid-70s, two products were introduced which we recommended heartily. One was the Vermont Castings wood stove, the other was the Apple personal computer. Both cost a few hundred dollars, both were made by and for revolutionaries who wanted to de-institutionalize society and empower the individual, both embodied clever design ideas and good business sense, and both became famous successes."
> "A 'hacker,' in the emerging definition, is anyone who pushes the edges of the possible and permissible. In Signal are techniques for hacking English, music, audio cassettes, postcards, rubber stamps, video, diagrams, robots and the nervous system, to name a fraction of the myriad represented here. In all of these realms the distance to the edge is not far, and the distance from one to another is no distance at all."