Today I reminisced about the Inside Macintosh series. Published by Addison-Wesley, it was a series of hard-cover books documenting the Macintosh API from the first Mac to the early 2000s. Actually, it was the reference of the Mac API; every other book outside of that series was derivative and not the source.
And, boy that was expensive, at $50 a book, and several books plus countless addendum added as the API evolved from System 1 to System 9, plus the gigantic shelf space needed for all of that. I felt really lucky to get the CD-ROM edition of the series. While the CD was in a bit over a hundred dollars, it not only had everything offline in proto-PDF format, but also it was fully indexed and searchable.
In fact, I lived both the end of paper-based software books and the beginning of web site documentation. I thus shortly experienced the nightmare of finding software development books in libraries and the bliss of instant access and search. Also, you had to pay to have the privilege of reading a book about an API, rather than having it freely available online.
The problem that remains is the inaccessibility of computer science journals, the primary reason why I'm more and more out of touch with the latest happening in cryptography. If they had a hybrid model of reasonable subscription prices and per-paper download, like iTunes, I wouldn't mind. Right now it completely sucks that only universities have the budget for access, with a similar artificial inflation effect as the private medical insurance system in the US.
Published on September 5, 2012 at 23:38 EDT
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