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Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

I have this book on my bookshelf. I wonder how common it is for people to keep old books like these instead of discarding them. I also have "APL: An Interactive Approach" among others. It feels like more than a coincidence that these two books were given to me.

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I still have the original manuals from my Macintosh (1984), including those for MacWrite and MacPaint, as well as the 1st ed "Macintosh" book by Cary Lu. It's really something else to see computer books from that era. Beautifully typeset and illustrated.

I have many (and still use several) old O'Reilly books as well, including The Whole Internet User's Guide and Catalog by Ed Krol... the Second Edition which adds a chapter about the World Wide Web. There is a quaint Catalog at the back listing sites on a number of topics from Science to Entertainment. Gopher, Usenet, FTP, WAIS, and yes WWW -- the "whole" internet.

For many obvious reasons, nobody makes hard-copy computer manuals anymore. I still enjoy reading books, even on computer topics I could otherwise be reading online.

I have several that I’ve kept, some in pretty bad shape including one that I used so much I put it in a big 3-ring binder.

- Learn Extended Color Basic (Coco days)

- The Handbook of BASIC Third Edition, David I. Schneider (8088 days)

- PC Interrupts, Kyle Brown (386 days)

I also have a few Turbo Basic books, which seem to be displaced at the moment.

I also still have an original user's guide, and I think the quick-reference pamphlet too.

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