Last typewriter factory in the world shuts its doors

[Gron Arthur]

I lament the death of web 1.0, like those that reflect on the passing
of the typewriter, with web1 hobbiest could produce informative web
pages with little effort.  There was ownership of the work produced,
with people having to rent a bit of server space.  Yes with the cloud
and web 2.0 you could do more things, interesting things, but at least
for a moment in the late 90s there was still a youthful spirit to the
endeavor.  Now advertising has crept into everything, phones and
devices are locked down.  We've moved from the 'Endless September' of
people learning the social norms of the net to letting ourselves be
constrained by companies disabling features to dumb down and profit
from our learned ignorance and breed apathy.

Perhaps we need a funeral for the typewriter and web 1.0 like the
"Death of the Hippie" ceremony in 1967.



On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 12:07 PM, Peter King <peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 28, 2011 at 09:27:27AM -0400, Gron Arthur wrote:
>
>> I'm not a fan of pdf books.  With HTML I can copy and paste easily -
>> that's what I'm interested in.  Form follows function.
>
> TeX can generate pdf (there is even a version, pdfTeX, that produces
> such files directly rather than dvi output)> TeX can also, with minor
> effort, produce reasonable html.
>
> However, I was addressing what tools professionals use these days --
> which I took to be a question about tools used to produce high-quality
> output, which still means printed books. TeX can and does drive Varitype
> printers, and is the final stage in many book-production presses. Because
> Knuth made some clever design decisions, it produces excellent output
> even on low-resolution output devices (like 2400dpi laser printers). It
> was even better on nine-pin dot matrix printers, all because Knuth used
> sophisticated line-breaking algorithms and page-description measurements
> (including his own version of kerning tables).
>
> For easy copy-and-paste I prefer straight ASCII text (or Unicode).
>
> --
> Peter King                              peter.king-H217xnMUJC0sA/PxXw9srA at public.gmane.org
> Department of Philosophy
> 170 St. George Street #521
> The University of Toronto                   (416)-978-4951 ofc
> Toronto, ON  M5R 2M8
>       CANADA
>
> http://individual.utoronto.ca/pking/
>
> =========================================================================
> GPG keyID 0x7587EC42 (2B14 A355 46BC 2A16 D0BC  36F5 1FE6 D32A 7587 EC42)
> gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --recv-keys 7587EC42
>
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