The feeling and smell of HTML doesn't quite compare to the feel and smell of those physical books. But I still think of those manuals whenever I see that bright six-color Apple logo.

[4/4]

When Macintosh was introduced as "the computer for the rest of us"—sporting its bright six-color Apple logo—what really caught my attention was the huge stack of Xeroxed "Inside Macintosh" developer manuals: kept in a three-ringed binder at the University's computer center, filled with loads of Pascal APIs. And when Steve introduced the NeXT cube with its stack of API manuals, I was entranced. My life has revolved around the platform ever since.

[3/4]

Even without the computer, I thought about what I could make that computer do when I got back, scribbling out BASIC programs in the back seat with pencil on paper.

I was entranced by the empowering possibilities of that early "bicycle for the mind"—a feeling that has never left me.

[2/4]

Every time I see the original bright six-color Apple logo, I'm reminded of the Apple ][ donated to our small school just before the end of the school year. I asked the librarian if I could borrow its stack of spiral-bound manuals over the summer. I pored through that stack of manuals as my family road-tripped from Seattle to South Dakota—my mind fully occupied by the information contained within, as my senses took in the feel of the paper and the smell of the books.

[1/4]

Ultimately, with NSFNet expanding in '88 and commercial ISPs emerging in '89, we had more network and computing available than ever—just not on the IBM mainframes hosting Bitnet.

Jarkko Oikarinen took inspiration from Bitnet's Relay and built the Internet Relay Chat (irc) for Unix. It was a little slow to take off, and has had its own drama (with net splits, etc.), but anyone with a Unix system can run their own server—and as a result, some 36+ years later it's still around.