There Is No Cat

Groovy '60s Sounds from the Land of Smile!

Friday, January 3, 2003

Do their insurance rates go down now that they're 25?

O'Reilly & Associates, court publishers to the Internet revolution, are celebrating their 25th anniversary. They're looking for stories. Here's mine.

I still have my first Nutshell handbook. It had a comb-binding, and had a brown cover with a picture of an acorn on it, so it pre-dates the advent of O'Reilly animals. It was 1987, and I had just discovered Usenet in my then-new job at the home of UNIX, AT&T. I was looking for more information about how to get the most out of this neat tool, and all the people in the newsfroups were lauding a book by this little company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that made the most UNIX-savvy books. So I sent away for a copy of Managing UUCP and Usenet and learned so much about the way things worked on this nascent network. I used to tell people that it was the book that changed my life; that's probably still true, come to think of it. I probably wouldn't have been net-savvy enough to pick up on the web when I did without it, for example, which deflected my career in the direction of making web sites. Not to mention that I met my future wife on Usenet in 1990.

The other early O'Reilly book I had wasn't actually published by O'Reilly & Associates. It was a copy of the classic UNIX Text Processing written by Tim O'Reilly and Dale Daugherty. Working for a technical publications group at AT&T as a Production Editor, the book was my bible, and had all the answers to the esoteric questions I was asking about troff, vi, sed, macros, and all the other arcana involved in making books with baling wire and string. I was pretty generous with my books, loaning them out as needed, but I never let UNIX Text Processing out of my sight. But then, none of the other Production Editors needed to borrow it, because they all had copies of their own.

Nowadays, I could probably fill an entire bookcase with my O'Reilly books. Happy 25th Anniversary! (Found via Kottke.)

Posted at 11:04 PM

Comments

Note: I’m tired of clearing the spam from my comments, so comments are no longer accepted.

Trackbacks

This site is copyright © 2002-2024, Ralph Brandi.

What do you mean there is no cat?

"You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat."

- Albert Einstein, explaining radio


There used to be a cat

[ photo of Mischief, a black and white cat ]

Mischief, 1988 - December 20, 2003

[ photo of Sylvester, a black and white cat ]

Sylvester (the Dorito Fiend), who died at Thanksgiving, 2000.


Stylesheets


This site is powered by Missouri. Show me!

Valid XHTML 1.0!

Valid CSS!

XML RSS feed

Read Me via Atom

new host

Me!

Home Page
Resume
Married
Photographs
Flickr Photostream
Instagram Archive
Twitter Archive

last.fm

There Is No Cat is a photo Ralph Brandi joint.


Archives

Search



Family Blogs

Geneablogy
Jersey Girl Dance
Awakening
DullBlog
Mime Is Money

Blogs I Read

2020 Hindsight
AccordionGuy
Adactio
Allied
Apartment Therapy
Assorted Nonsense
Backup Brain
Burningbird
Chocolate and Vodka
Creative Tech Writer
Critical Distance
Daily Kos
Dan Misener likes the radio
Daring Fireball
Design Your Life
design*sponge
Doc Searls
Edith Frost
Elegant Hack
Emergency Weblog
Empty Bottle
Five Acres with a View
Flashes of Panic
Future of Radio
Groundhog Day
Hello Mary Lu
iheni
Inessential
Interllectual
Jeffrey Zeldman Presents
Jersey Beat
John Gushue ... Dot Dot Dot
john peel every day
JOHO The Blog
Kathryn Cramer
Kimberly Blessing
La Emisora de la Revolucion
Lacunae
Loobylu
mamamusings
Medley
mr. nice guy
MyDD
Orcinus
oz: the blog of glenda sims
Pinkie Style
Pinkie Style Photos
Pop Culture Junk Mail
Seaweed Chronicles
Shortwave Music
Slipstream
Talking Points Memo
The Unheard Word
Tom Sundstrom - trsc.com
Typographica
Unadorned
Vantan.org
WFMU's Beware of the Blog