
Signal: Communication Tools for the Information Age (1988) - dredmorbius
http://gen.lib.rus.ec/book/index.php?md5=A517FEE1D9EEF88949CF75B5B7471701
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walterbell
From the intro:

> _" Back when the original Whole Earth Catalog was having a heyday in the
> mid-70s, two products were introduced which we recommended heartily. One was
> the Vermont Castings wood stove, the other was the Apple personal computer.
> Both cost a few hundred dollars, both were made by and for revolutionaries
> who wanted to de-institutionalize society and empower the individual, both
> embodied clever design ideas and good business sense, and both became famous
> successes."_

> _" A 'hacker,' in the emerging definition, is anyone who pushes the edges of
> the possible and permissible. In Signal are techniques for hacking English,
> music, audio cassettes, postcards, rubber stamps, video, diagrams, robots
> and the nervous system, to name a fraction of the myriad represented here.
> In all of these realms the distance to the edge is not far, and the distance
> from one to another is no distance at all."_

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dredmorbius
_Signal_ was one of the Whole Earth Catalog publications of the 1980s.

As an exemplar of curation and selection, as well as pressaging ... a huge
amount of ... the current technological and online domain, it's hard to beat.

It seemed to briefly appear online (possibly at the Internet Archive), but
disappeared again. It's now at LibGen.

Just twenty pages in, the selection of books and references is already pretty
staggering (and contains numerous of my own choices and faves from the
period).

Oddly: an argument for expertise and selection rather than the more popular
trends of today of "crowdsourcing" and "collaborative filtering" everything.
There's probably a balance between these poles.

~~~
walterbell
This is incredible. Thanks for posting.

~~~
dredmorbius
I feel like a kid in a candy store :)

