Well, AFAICT, OpenOffice doesn't support master/sub-documents either (unless said support is coded in Java).
As I noted in my first post, I would like to use something other than Word for some fairly complex documents which already have master / sub-documents setup (and some master / sub (Master / sub) ), so _for my purposes_ it's a non-starter if an alternative doesn't support such.
I'd liefer use LyX or Texinfo, but can't get that past management.
Gnumeric bores me --- why do people persist in cloning extant views when they could instead be improving on them? Javelin was a long ways back, and Lotus Improv really should've been the future of spreadsheets...
The weird thing is, this sort of fakery has been well-covered in fiction,[1,2] so one would think that manufacturers would be concerned with it.
William
[1] Steve Perry's Matador series has instances of people using fake palm prints to open doors secured by a palm lock --- for that matter, Frank Herbert's _Dune_ has the Bene Gesserit ``witch'' Jessica opening a palm lock w/o any tools / fake print.
[2] more disturbingly, Timothy Zahn's _Blackcollar_ has mention of instances (in the past) where a person's head and hands are severed so as to allow access to an area secured by retinal and fingerprint scanners --- in the book, mention of said instances is used as a threat to force a captive's cooperation.
IME, AbiWord is a non-starter for complex documents since AFAICT it doesn't have any support for Word's Master / Sub-document feature (nor even outline view).
Downloading OpenOffice now to see if it includes such.
Type, black and white, monochrome laser printers &c.
(There's only one thing like to a colour imagesetter, a _huge_ system which one feeds colour photo paper, which is then imaged and developed, allowing one to have full colour photographic prints ~39 x 54 inches or so)
For rendering type, 300 dpi monochrome is as clunky as a 14" 640 x 480 VGA screen is for a an 8 x 10 glossy colour photo.
Actually, 300dpi is quite clunky for text, and a number of fonts _cannot_ be adequately represented by it (e.g., Optima or Eras --- Adobe even went to the effort of including two different outlines (one low-res, one high res) for early versions of these until hinting algorithms improved).
~360--400dpi is a watershed value and around there text, even with fairly subtle details starts to look right (Interestingly the NeXTLaserprinter could print in 300 or 400 dpi, and one can _really_ see the difference (says the guy who forgt to change the value once before running out resumes and had to reprint a set 'cause they looked bad).
600dpi is ``good enough'' for most things (and is approaching the ability of office paper to hold a dot faithfully)
At 1200 dpi, things are quite nice, but the human ability to create / render type actually approaches that of a 2540 dpi imagesetter --- see Fred Smeijers' book _Counterpunch_ for technical data and microphotography for details. F.W. Goudy often claimed to be able to distinguish by touch dimensions of ~one one-thousandth of an inch.
Okay, maybe I'm biased (I've used a NeXT Cube as my main system for over a decade now), but we finally got back a Sparcstation 5 here at work, and I've just finished installing OPENSTEP 4.2 on it.
I'm looking forward to running
- tetex (not sure which version, trying to find a version w/ otp2ocp which doesn't crash)
- Dmitri Linde's InstantTeX and TeXView Hyper w/ hyperlink support
- Cenon (a NeXT-era CAD/CAM program making the jump to DTP illustration on Mac OS X, OPENSTEP 4.2 and Linux running GNUstep, see http://www.cenon.info )
and a couple of other nifty quad-architecture things, (the Lighthouse office suite) or stuff I can manage to get compiled.
Under Solaris we used this box to run Miles 33 (a proprietary typesetting system), which I couldn't even tell was taking advantage of Display PostScript --- is there something nifty I could do with this under Solaris that I'm not seeing?
Actually, they set it in small capitals originally, 'cause they'd ``just gotten a laserprinter to support (some typesetting package, troff?) and were dizzy with the possibility of scaling type.'' or some such.
So in TeX it's \textsc{unix} --- apparently this distinction and giddiness has been lost to whoever's in charge of the trademark these days --- given what GE has done w/ their corporate identity, I'm not surprised.
Okay, well in that case, what I'd do is have two separate files, one which typesets the text on pages sized appropriately to match the desired need for columns, then another which pulls in those pages as.pdfs and places them and anything else needed.
You should be able to use the package multicol in a minipage though (but if it's for commercial use, please contribute if possible---see the license / readme of that package for details).
Oh yeah, uneven columns and irregular areas can be handled using TeX's parshape primitive --- for an example of how this works, look up the parshape tool for xfig which allows one to draw a shape and then have a parshape created to match it.
Re-read my last paragraph---I don't think interactive multi-line justification is a very good idea. My suggestion was merely to note that there is a quick and dirty way to improve H&J in Scribus with very little effort required.
InDesign manages it though, as does texmacs, so it's certainly feasible, but the H&J then has to be folded into the app itself. Arguably this is the correct approach, though as I noted, one which some users will under some circumstances find somewhat disconcerting.
Just define a boxed area and the text to go in it --- spin off a tex process feeding it the text and the dimensions, get back a.dvi which you can then parse to get a set of text characters broken up by line, along with hyphenation points if any, use said data to typeset the box --- won't be fast, but it'd at least work as a proof of concept.
You probably don't want to be applying the algorithm on-the-fly anyway, a change in text at the end of a paragraph can change a line break at the beginning, which is somewhat distracting when editing in real-time. There was a NeXT word processor, Cedar Word which used TeX's H&J, and that was one aspect of it which was quite hard to get used to.
A LaTeX minipage isn't set up to allow movement of text out of it. There's a package on CTAN for doing leaflets / newsletters which does something of this sort of thing, but I think it's Plain TeX. AFAIK, LaTeX doesn't have a facility for doing splits outside of the the main text flow (where it's handled by the output routine).
That said, you can accomplish this sort of thing using TeX primitives to put things in boxes and then split them.
I'm having trouble envisioning why one would need to do this for a poster anyway.
William (who did a post in TeX, look at http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate )
My big disappointment with Scribus is that they've not done anything interesting with H&J (surely, at a minimum they could make use of TeX's algorithm?).
Interestingly, InDesign makes use of TeX's algorithm (by way of URW's HZ program) as the basis for their multi-line composer.
GIMP really needs to have a generalized model for handling colours as ink and ink mixes --- this would get them CMYK support ``for free'', but doing this sort of thing without running afoul of extant patents on colour representation is rather a thorny issue.
An interesting and viable alternative is to just use RGB w/ the colour calibration and allow the conversion to CMYK to be done in the RIP (which is the big advantage of the PDF/X-3 support).
For my part, InDesign rubs me the wrong way since it's like to a hybrid of two programs I don't much like, Quark and Illustrator. The UI for Scribus does seem quite promising, which is nice for an opensource program.
That said, other alternatives for opensource publishing (for long / technical documents mostly) include LyX, http://www.lyx.org (uses LaTeX as a back-end for typesetting) and texmacs (which is a visual hybrid of emacs and TeX)
It would be a lot more interesting to me if the display was a pen slate which could be detached---it actually looks somewhat like some of the docked Tablet models. It's really a shame that the only pen computing option Apple offers is a PowerMac G5 w/ a Wacom Cintiq (Inkwell, nee Rosetta is quite nice though)
Interesting and more functional looking than the previous iMac, but not as lively / friendly in appearance --- I suspect the G4 iMacs will become highly appreciated like the G4 Cubes eventually did.
William (who got tired of waiting for Apple to do a successor to the Newton and started buying Fujitsu pen slates)
Well, there was the IBM TransNote --- this was weird --- a leather portfolio with a CrossPad electronic pad and inkpen _and_ a ThinkPad w/ a digitizer and a tricksy swiveling display.
The other issue is that a cellphone-sized device is of necessity limited in its capabilities:
physically
- too small for reading a length e-text/book (comfortably)
- too small for marking up an e-text/book
- too small for writing lengthy texts (with a reasonable facility for editing / reviewing it)
- too small for drawing / sketching anything much larger than a postage stamp
processor/storage-wise they're still kind of limited as well.
My Fujitsu Stylistic has all of my MP3s, a complete backup of my NeXT Cube, and _all_ of my documents (including files dating back to high school and the school's Apple ][s), including my portfolio and Adobe Reader 6 and a web browser so I can load it and show it to anyone)
Sure, I could use a laptop for much of that, but then I'd have to haul around a graphics tablet as well, and I have to manage to find space to open it up, room for the tablet &c.
I'm still trying to transition fully to my Fujitsu Stylistic (it has to replace my Newton MessagePad, and my NeXT Cube---it's a very serviceable replacement for my ThinkPad and Dock I).
The note-taking software is a deal-breaker (as is battery life---I've _got_ to track down an AC adapter for use in my car).
- Aha! InkWriter was absorbed into MS (and won't run on anything but Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing)
- Lexicus Longhand and a bunch of other apps are vanished
- IBM InkManager is interesting, but clunky UI-wise and uses its own HWR system
I've mostly been using FutureWave SmartSketch, but it's awkward (no ink as such, though it does do nice vector graphics, to get text as text I have to insert a WordPad object or switch from MS Pen Services to CIC Handwriter (but that works for less than 10 min. at a time, then turns itself off::grr:: really do need to look into getting PenOffice)
I'm rather hopeful for Digitalnote, a Java app:
http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/digitalnote/
which I just came across --- still need to d/l it and try it out though.
The Tablet PCs which have Wacom digitizers have 256 levels of pressure input (with the (possibly optional) ``Penabled'' driver (which one may have to download from www.wacom.com) --- they also don't support the full range of pens/ input devices which (say) a Wacom Intuos will.
The tradeoff is directness (which one can alternately get w/ a Cintiq) and portability (this was a big reason for me to switch to pen computing --- got tired of lugging a graphics tablet for use with my laptop, or having to scan my sketchbook for those times I didn't have it / haul it out).
There was a very interesting post contrasting a TabletPC w/ a Wacom Cintiq for an artist's use at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com a while back.
Well there's Xstroke for text input (more like Graffiti/Unistroke than normal handwriting though)
http://www.xstroke.org/
Jarnal is a beginning of a replacement for Journal --- uses SVG as a file format though --- it'll get much cooler if it gets shifted to the ink annotation XML standard the W3C has been proposing (only the software for Logitech's Io uses it thus far AFAIK).
http://www.dklevine.com/general/software/tc1000/ ja rnal.htm
Berkeley's Graphical User Interface Research group has some pretty cool work for pen / alternative UI design in Java which works well in Linux:
http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/
There's still a lot missing though, including analogs to:
- FutureWave SmartSketch (this started on Go Corp.'s PenPoint, moved to the Mac and Windows and morphed into Future Splash Animator and became the program known as Flash) --- I still can't believe Macromedia sold this off to Broderbund instead of doing as Alias did and creating a vector version of SketchBook with it.
- Creaturehouse Expression (not a pen computing program per se, but way cool on a tablet), basically one can set an arbitrary object to follow an arbitrary path ---- sounds bizarre until one thinks of drawing a single flower, and then drawing an entire garden w/ slight variations.
- Ambient Design ArtRage - not a painting program, but a painting simulation. Apparently there're some natural media plugins for the GIMP, but they've a ways to go, especially UI wise.
- Adobe Acrobat 6.pdf annotation - this is _much_ better than in v5 or earlier and works quite well w/ a pen, though not ink enabled.
Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ is a very good back story on the early to mid-years of pen / tablet computing, which I always recommend.
It's interesting that Microsoft puts rather a disingenuous spin on the early collision between Microsoft and Go Corp. in the book _Building Tablet PC Applications_ (how believable is this book? Well, while the technical / programming information is well-spoken of, there're a number of errors in it (they even mis-spelled Fujitsu!) so I'd take it's version of history with a grain of salt.
Almost as interesting is the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue --- Building an IBM Brand_ which has some of the IBM side of the story (the ThinkPad was originally conceived of as a pen tablet / slate, not a clam shell laptop, with the name derived from leather notebook pad holders embossed with ``Think'' which IBM provided to employees).
William (Who still misses PenPoint, and hasn't bought an Apple product since the Newton, except for OPENSTEP 4.2)
Actually, jeans these days have one fewer rivet than they used to have, the crotch rivet, which went away because of ``crotch rivet syndrome'' (imagine a group of cowpokes gathered around a fire on a cold night, still, quiet, peaceful, until someone shifts position, bringing a certain bit of metal in contact with a sensitive part of their anatomy)
I've heard it said they went away after Levi Strauss himself sat around such a camp file and succumbed to said experience.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, AFAICT, OpenOffice doesn't support master/sub-documents either (unless said support is coded in Java).
As I noted in my first post, I would like to use something other than Word for some fairly complex documents which already have master / sub-documents setup (and some master / sub (Master / sub) ), so _for my purposes_ it's a non-starter if an alternative doesn't support such.
I'd liefer use LyX or Texinfo, but can't get that past management.
Gnumeric bores me --- why do people persist in cloning extant views when they could instead be improving on them? Javelin was a long ways back, and Lotus Improv really should've been the future of spreadsheets...
William
The weird thing is, this sort of fakery has been well-covered in fiction,[1,2] so one would think that manufacturers would be concerned with it.
William
[1] Steve Perry's Matador series has instances of people using fake palm prints to open doors secured by a palm lock --- for that matter, Frank Herbert's _Dune_ has the Bene Gesserit ``witch'' Jessica opening a palm lock w/o any tools / fake print.
[2] more disturbingly, Timothy Zahn's _Blackcollar_ has mention of instances (in the past) where a person's head and hands are severed so as to allow access to an area secured by retinal and fingerprint scanners --- in the book, mention of said instances is used as a threat to force a captive's cooperation.
IME, AbiWord is a non-starter for complex documents since AFAICT it doesn't have any support for Word's Master / Sub-document feature (nor even outline view).
Downloading OpenOffice now to see if it includes such.
William
Type, black and white, monochrome laser printers &c.
(There's only one thing like to a colour imagesetter, a _huge_ system which one feeds colour photo paper, which is then imaged and developed, allowing one to have full colour photographic prints ~39 x 54 inches or so)
For rendering type, 300 dpi monochrome is as clunky as a 14" 640 x 480 VGA screen is for a an 8 x 10 glossy colour photo.
William
Actually, 300dpi is quite clunky for text, and a number of fonts _cannot_ be adequately represented by it (e.g., Optima or Eras --- Adobe even went to the effort of including two different outlines (one low-res, one high res) for early versions of these until hinting algorithms improved).
~360--400dpi is a watershed value and around there text, even with fairly subtle details starts to look right (Interestingly the NeXTLaserprinter could print in 300 or 400 dpi, and one can _really_ see the difference (says the guy who forgt to change the value once before running out resumes and had to reprint a set 'cause they looked bad).
600dpi is ``good enough'' for most things (and is approaching the ability of office paper to hold a dot faithfully)
At 1200 dpi, things are quite nice, but the human ability to create / render type actually approaches that of a 2540 dpi imagesetter --- see Fred Smeijers' book _Counterpunch_ for technical data and microphotography for details. F.W. Goudy often claimed to be able to distinguish by touch dimensions of ~one one-thousandth of an inch.
William
Okay, maybe I'm biased (I've used a NeXT Cube as my main system for over a decade now), but we finally got back a Sparcstation 5 here at work, and I've just finished installing OPENSTEP 4.2 on it.
I'm looking forward to running
- tetex (not sure which version, trying to find a version w/ otp2ocp which doesn't crash)
- Dmitri Linde's InstantTeX and TeXView Hyper w/ hyperlink support
- Cenon (a NeXT-era CAD/CAM program making the jump to DTP illustration on Mac OS X, OPENSTEP 4.2 and Linux running GNUstep, see http://www.cenon.info )
and a couple of other nifty quad-architecture things, (the Lighthouse office suite) or stuff I can manage to get compiled.
Under Solaris we used this box to run Miles 33 (a proprietary typesetting system), which I couldn't even tell was taking advantage of Display PostScript --- is there something nifty I could do with this under Solaris that I'm not seeing?
How 'bout Linux?
William
Actually, they set it in small capitals originally, 'cause they'd ``just gotten a laserprinter to support (some typesetting package, troff?) and were dizzy with the possibility of scaling type.'' or some such.
So in TeX it's \textsc{unix} --- apparently this distinction and giddiness has been lost to whoever's in charge of the trademark these days --- given what GE has done w/ their corporate identity, I'm not surprised.
William
You really should read the book, _The Dust of Empire_ to get the history behind all of the above.
It's tremendously more complex than you make it out, and it had a lot of other ramifications which you're ignoring (esp. during WWII and earlier).
William
Okay, well in that case, what I'd do is have two separate files, one which typesets the text on pages sized appropriately to match the desired need for columns, then another which pulls in those pages as .pdfs and places them and anything else needed.
You should be able to use the package multicol in a minipage though (but if it's for commercial use, please contribute if possible---see the license / readme of that package for details).
William
Oh yeah, uneven columns and irregular areas can be handled using TeX's parshape primitive --- for an example of how this works, look up the parshape tool for xfig which allows one to draw a shape and then have a parshape created to match it.
William
Re-read my last paragraph---I don't think interactive multi-line justification is a very good idea. My suggestion was merely to note that there is a quick and dirty way to improve H&J in Scribus with very little effort required.
InDesign manages it though, as does texmacs, so it's certainly feasible, but the H&J then has to be folded into the app itself. Arguably this is the correct approach, though as I noted, one which some users will under some circumstances find somewhat disconcerting.
William
Why not?
.dvi which you can then parse to get a set of text characters broken up by line, along with hyphenation points if any, use said data to typeset the box --- won't be fast, but it'd at least work as a proof of concept.
Just define a boxed area and the text to go in it --- spin off a tex process feeding it the text and the dimensions, get back a
You probably don't want to be applying the algorithm on-the-fly anyway, a change in text at the end of a paragraph can change a line break at the beginning, which is somewhat distracting when editing in real-time. There was a NeXT word processor, Cedar Word which used TeX's H&J, and that was one aspect of it which was quite hard to get used to.
William
A LaTeX minipage isn't set up to allow movement of text out of it. There's a package on CTAN for doing leaflets / newsletters which does something of this sort of thing, but I think it's Plain TeX. AFAIK, LaTeX doesn't have a facility for doing splits outside of the the main text flow (where it's handled by the output routine).
That said, you can accomplish this sort of thing using TeX primitives to put things in boxes and then split them.
I'm having trouble envisioning why one would need to do this for a poster anyway.
William
(who did a post in TeX, look at http://www.tug.org/tug2003/donate )
My big disappointment with Scribus is that they've not done anything interesting with H&J (surely, at a minimum they could make use of TeX's algorithm?).
Interestingly, InDesign makes use of TeX's algorithm (by way of URW's HZ program) as the basis for their multi-line composer.
GIMP really needs to have a generalized model for handling colours as ink and ink mixes --- this would get them CMYK support ``for free'', but doing this sort of thing without running afoul of extant patents on colour representation is rather a thorny issue.
An interesting and viable alternative is to just use RGB w/ the colour calibration and allow the conversion to CMYK to be done in the RIP (which is the big advantage of the PDF/X-3 support).
For my part, InDesign rubs me the wrong way since it's like to a hybrid of two programs I don't much like, Quark and Illustrator. The UI for Scribus does seem quite promising, which is nice for an opensource program.
That said, other alternatives for opensource publishing (for long / technical documents mostly) include LyX, http://www.lyx.org (uses LaTeX as a back-end for typesetting) and texmacs (which is a visual hybrid of emacs and TeX)
William
It would be a lot more interesting to me if the display was a pen slate which could be detached---it actually looks somewhat like some of the docked Tablet models. It's really a shame that the only pen computing option Apple offers is a PowerMac G5 w/ a Wacom Cintiq (Inkwell, nee Rosetta is quite nice though)
Interesting and more functional looking than the previous iMac, but not as lively / friendly in appearance --- I suspect the G4 iMacs will become highly appreciated like the G4 Cubes eventually did.
William
(who got tired of waiting for Apple to do a successor to the Newton and started buying Fujitsu pen slates)
Not really freeware --- it's time-limited and due to expire in a bit more than a decade.
William
Well, there was the IBM TransNote --- this was weird --- a leather portfolio with a CrossPad electronic pad and inkpen _and_ a ThinkPad w/ a digitizer and a tricksy swiveling display.
William
The other issue is that a cellphone-sized device is of necessity limited in its capabilities:
physically
- too small for reading a length e-text/book (comfortably)
- too small for marking up an e-text/book
- too small for writing lengthy texts (with a reasonable facility for editing / reviewing it)
- too small for drawing / sketching anything much larger than a postage stamp
processor/storage-wise they're still kind of limited as well.
My Fujitsu Stylistic has all of my MP3s, a complete backup of my NeXT Cube, and _all_ of my documents (including files dating back to high school and the school's Apple ][s), including my portfolio and Adobe Reader 6 and a web browser so I can load it and show it to anyone)
Sure, I could use a laptop for much of that, but then I'd have to haul around a graphics tablet as well, and I have to manage to find space to open it up, room for the tablet &c.
William
I'm still trying to transition fully to my Fujitsu Stylistic (it has to replace my Newton MessagePad, and my NeXT Cube---it's a very serviceable replacement for my ThinkPad and Dock I).
::grr:: really do need to look into getting PenOffice)
The note-taking software is a deal-breaker (as is battery life---I've _got_ to track down an AC adapter for use in my car).
- Aha! InkWriter was absorbed into MS (and won't run on anything but Windows 3.1 for Pen Computing)
- Lexicus Longhand and a bunch of other apps are vanished
- IBM InkManager is interesting, but clunky UI-wise and uses its own HWR system
I've mostly been using FutureWave SmartSketch, but it's awkward (no ink as such, though it does do nice vector graphics, to get text as text I have to insert a WordPad object or switch from MS Pen Services to CIC Handwriter (but that works for less than 10 min. at a time, then turns itself off
I'm rather hopeful for Digitalnote, a Java app:
http://www.cs.utep.edu/nigel/digitalnote/
which I just came across --- still need to d/l it and try it out though.
William
The Tablet PCs which have Wacom digitizers have 256 levels of pressure input (with the (possibly optional) ``Penabled'' driver (which one may have to download from www.wacom.com) --- they also don't support the full range of pens/ input devices which (say) a Wacom Intuos will.
The tradeoff is directness (which one can alternately get w/ a Cintiq) and portability (this was a big reason for me to switch to pen computing --- got tired of lugging a graphics tablet for use with my laptop, or having to scan my sketchbook for those times I didn't have it / haul it out).
There was a very interesting post contrasting a TabletPC w/ a Wacom Cintiq for an artist's use at http://www.tabletpcbuzz.com a while back.
William
Well there's Xstroke for text input (more like Graffiti/Unistroke than normal handwriting though)
/ ja rnal.htm
.pdf annotation - this is _much_ better than in v5 or earlier and works quite well w/ a pen, though not ink enabled.
http://www.xstroke.org/
Jarnal is a beginning of a replacement for Journal --- uses SVG as a file format though --- it'll get much cooler if it gets shifted to the ink annotation XML standard the W3C has been proposing (only the software for Logitech's Io uses it thus far AFAIK).
http://www.dklevine.com/general/software/tc1000
Berkeley's Graphical User Interface Research group has some pretty cool work for pen / alternative UI design in Java which works well in Linux:
http://guir.berkeley.edu/projects/denim/
There's still a lot missing though, including analogs to:
- FutureWave SmartSketch (this started on Go Corp.'s PenPoint, moved to the Mac and Windows and morphed into Future Splash Animator and became the program known as Flash) --- I still can't believe Macromedia sold this off to Broderbund instead of doing as Alias did and creating a vector version of SketchBook with it.
- Creaturehouse Expression (not a pen computing program per se, but way cool on a tablet), basically one can set an arbitrary object to follow an arbitrary path ---- sounds bizarre until one thinks of drawing a single flower, and then drawing an entire garden w/ slight variations.
- Ambient Design ArtRage - not a painting program, but a painting simulation. Apparently there're some natural media plugins for the GIMP, but they've a ways to go, especially UI wise.
- Adobe Acrobat 6
William
::applause::
PenPoint was conceptually so right, it pains me that people are cloning Excel or Word instead of looking farther afield for better ideas.
That said, my Fujitsu Stylistic is getting close to replacing my NeXT Cube....
William
Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ is a very good back story on the early to mid-years of pen / tablet computing, which I always recommend.
It's interesting that Microsoft puts rather a disingenuous spin on the early collision between Microsoft and Go Corp. in the book _Building Tablet PC Applications_ (how believable is this book? Well, while the technical / programming information is well-spoken of, there're a number of errors in it (they even mis-spelled Fujitsu!) so I'd take it's version of history with a grain of salt.
Almost as interesting is the book _ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue --- Building an IBM Brand_ which has some of the IBM side of the story (the ThinkPad was originally conceived of as a pen tablet / slate, not a clam shell laptop, with the name derived from leather notebook pad holders embossed with ``Think'' which IBM provided to employees).
William
(Who still misses PenPoint, and hasn't bought an Apple product since the Newton, except for OPENSTEP 4.2)
Actually, jeans these days have one fewer rivet than they used to have, the crotch rivet, which went away because of ``crotch rivet syndrome'' (imagine a group of cowpokes gathered around a fire on a cold night, still, quiet, peaceful, until someone shifts position, bringing a certain bit of metal in contact with a sensitive part of their anatomy)
I've heard it said they went away after Levi Strauss himself sat around such a camp file and succumbed to said experience.
William
Forgot two.
;)
Steve Perry's stuff is fun, light reading.
Hal Clements is classic old stuff, probably more along the lines of what the OP really wanted
William