I was bouncing around google looking for toroidal pump designs, when an article from an old Popular Mechanic appeared. April, 1976. Hilarious cigarette propoganda aside, what struck me were the ads for minimalist personal tractor kits, as well as beginner instructions and kits for building your own metal lathe, with parts ordering, or complete item delivery available. (p.68, 200, others)  Can we crib off these dudes? Modern techniques are better, and so's transport & communication infrastructure; that sounds like the feasibility tipping point they needed, that Marcin has. My next thought is: reference library donations? (p. 149, 159) I'd love to devote to a project, there. (Anthony Repetto/Concept Log - jotting down possibilities; something certain in a week, mehbe?) ...and I honestly had these thoughts, almost immediately afterwards: "Well, if I'm out there a month, I'll have to bring some books. Oh! And Marcin would love all Boeyens stuff - theoretical physics and all. Heck, I should bring those other stacks; they're relevant. I might be able to do media mail... Do I really need to bring them all back with me, at the end of the month? Why would I be leaving?"  Coders love libraries; they do most of the design work for them. Unfortunately, the good-intentioned google search can still only return results by article titles and text, not relevance of ad texts. You have to flip through the pages, for that.


(A little praise for paper is deserved: imagine it's 1870, and you bring me a document you'd drafted at your desk. You hand it to me, and I place it on my grand oak business cabinet stump, with locked drawers and a green felt mat. I glance down at my desk top, and sigh - "That document is not in the right format. How do I read it?" You remember, and are stricken with terror - you'd written the page on your drafting table, with its artistic easel features... it even has a sleek, compact look. You spend the next 20 minutes with my pointy-haired idiocy, showing me which of the children's decoder-rings to steal from the street vendors. Every few months, they issue new ones, and all the kids use them to play a singing game. You have to constantly show me which of these will let me read what you wrote at your desk. It gets worse. Those files from '67? They were in a cabinet that crashed. All the pages were destroyed. And, the whole company is worried, because someone squeezed through the lavatory window last week, while there were folks in the office, and they stole the personal records of over a million customers! How did they fit the pages through the window?!
The message: there's ALWAYS a trade-off. ouch - I feel like an economist. Sure, they didn't have typewriters, or IBM punch cards, or analog routers, or modern stuff; but have you seen those kids use an abacus? And slide rules are handy; add a few drafting tools, and you can do some wild stuff. Gregg's short hand is an inspiration, too. Our CDs become unreadable in 15 years. Archaeologists won't be able to view Adobe. And... do you pull documents off your earliest computers? But you still have those old journals, right?)