It is, as I say, a small list. 100 Suns, of course. Also, American Ground Zero (do not try to read all at once), At Work in the Fields of the Bomb (interviews and portraits of Los Alamos and Livermore weapons scientists), and How to Photograph and Atomic Bomb. I might also include the souvenir book I got at the Nevada test site when we went on the bus tour in 2003.
I remember using Wordstar for CP/M. It did pretty much everything you needed, and it didn't get in your way.
I was also a heavy user of XyWrite. One of the fun things about XyWrite was you could get it do almost anything. If there wasn't a code for it, you could insert printer controls directly into your file.
As a production editor now, one feature those systems didn't have that we rely on is being able to track and review edits. Thirty years ago that would have been done on paper printouts.
A new Leica M6 goes for about $7K at B&H. When you could still buy them, Rolleiflexes were about that much. A mechanical camera hand-made in short runs in Germany? Not gonna be cheap. If you can afford and think you'll use it enough to make it worthwhile, there are worse things you could spend your money on.
I use a Melitta pour over cone, a Baratza grinder, a kettle with a temp control, and a spoon. Once in a while, I'll get out the French press. Good coffee doesn't really need to be complicated. You just need decent fresh beans and a little care.
Having been on the other side of that, there is a point. When an editor writes a rejection letter, aside from the fact that it already means what you wrote was better than 97% of what the editor saw that week, telling you why they turned it down isn't really quite the same level of feedback you get from an editor who has accepted a story and wants to get it over the proverbial finish line. A rejection letter is very broad strokes and first-impression. It's not actually editing. Editing needs a closer read, often a bit of back-and-forth with the author (I should say I learned a lot about editing in my younger days from both David Hartwell and Beth Meacham).
Many new trade hardcover books will not last that long. I work at a university press, and we still use acid-free paper, quarter-cloth bindings, sturdy boards, and other niceties that the big trade houses are increasingly giving up on. Guess what? Most of our books cost more than $30, or even $40.
I still remember seeing Terry do a reading of this at Lunacon, I think, shortly after it was published. It was a good reading, he really knew how to land a joke.
They might be, but that’s not really a reason to let bad people stay in jobs they shouldn’t have. Otherwise e might as well give up any pretense of accountability and just let them do whatever they want.
There was also SpaceWar! from MIT, which Nolan Bushnell turned into a standalone cabinet game. Though I think you could make a case for Pong being the first coin-op video game, a commercial game rather than something that primarily existed in academic labs.
I spent years as a freelance proofreader and copyeditor. One of the reasons I don't so much any more is I was getting too many political books, books where the authors were not so interested in facts or logic--or even internal consistency. Most of these books were 'conservative' but this was not exclusively a right-wing issue. Ideology requires glossing over the complexity of the real world. It's draining to read this stuff, with limited ability to make corrections.
Hell, now I work for a uni press, and I'm seeing this in our own list more and more--writers are giving up on deep analysis.
"The fight has been about the Pentagon wanting to use Anthropic’s models even more than the company wants, which doesn’t seem like the thing you’d fight for if you thought the models presented security risks."