New subject: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"

10 Sep 2023

...
 > If you want to build a ship, don't drum up
people to collect wood and
> don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the
> endless immensity of the sea. 
On Sun, 10 Sep 2023, Sellam Abraham via cctalk wrote:
...
  We must teach Fred to long for the endless immensity
of the written word
 (in book form, focusing specifically on floppy disk drives). 
45 years ago, I started writing about repairing Honda cars.  Wasn't getting far 
until an acquaintance who fancied himself to be a writer got me to agree to do 
a book with him.  He sold the idea to John Muir Publications (publisher of the 
Volkswagen Idiot book, different John Muir).  I wrote it, my co-author edited, 
the publisher put their own editor on it, who butchered it.  But, the publisher 
also brought in Peter Aschwanden, who is a GREAT automotive illustrator (see 
the VW idiot book). In 1979, I switched to TRS80, and did it with Electric 
Pencil, and then Scripsit.  I had a DTC300 Hytype-I daisy wheel printer.  I 
printed it 8.5" wide down the middle of 14 7/8 paper, giving lots of room for 
comments, etc.  For the illustrator, I printed it on the left side of the wide 
paper, leaving a large area for doodles.  The publisher's editor butchered it 
badly enough that my co-author switched to a pseudonym.  With the publisher's 
accounting, never got enough in royalties to fuuly pay all of my expenses.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Keep-Your-Honda-Alive/dp/0912528257

In the 1990s, I started writing about floppy disks, how FM/MFM worked, IBM/WD 
track and sector structure, directory structures, DOS Utilities, disk repair, 
etc.
But, got bogged down with too much to do, such as closing my office, etc., . . 
.

20 years ago, I started writing an undergraduate textbook on Information 
Science.  How searches and search engines work, and how to search better, how 
companies cheat the search engines (SEO), relevance ranking, trade-offs between 
recall and precision (cf. Buckland), the DIK[W[E]] 
(Data/Information/Knowledge/[Wisdom/[Enlightenment]]) pyramid, etc.  I wanted 
to make a community college class out of it. But, certain administrators (who I 
failed to ever defenestrate) refused to consider understanding of information 
to be appropriate for community college (anything beyond their total lack of 
comprehension was "inappropriate")
(Do YOU consider it "computer literate" to create a memo about a room change 
for a meeting in WordPerfect, print it with a color printer (for the logo and a 
ruling line), SCAN that printed memo, and send it out as an ATTACHMENT to an 
email with subject line of "FYI" and text body of "See the
attachment"?)
I haven't made progress on it lately.

So, yes, I have always longed for the endless immensity of the written word, . 
. .

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin(a)xenosoft.com

Re: For Fred, especially: "Everything I know about floppy disks"