I hope you like links, and lots of history.  It’s been a bumper crop this week.

• The Radio Shack catalog from 1983.  Including such gems as 156,672 characters of storage per $600 disk.  For perspective, that’s about $4 per kilobyte.  A randomly-picked SSD is about 0.000001 cent per kilobyte.  Previously linked here: Radio Shack 2002.  (via)
• Hey, O’Reilly has a comprehensive list of all their open-licensed book titles, for download.  Found from a link to Unix Text Editing.  I bet much of that book still applies, despite being from 1987.  (indirectly via)
• The MOS 6502 and the Best Layout Guy in the World.
• Shady Characters Miscellany #20: On Typewriters.  The ancestor of the TTY.   It’s still just barely possible to buy a new typewriter.  I worked for a printer cartridge remanufacturer for a few years; the highest-profit items were typewriter ribbons, because nobody else made them.
• The UNIX philosophy and a fear of pixels.  I think the author’s conflating philosophy and style.  (via)
• Bell Labs CSR Selected Technical Reports.  (via)  Warning: they’re all in Postscript.  Includes Brian Kernighan’s “Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language“, and I’m linking there to a non-Postscript version to make your life a little easier.
• If the idea of non-standard hexadecimal breaks your brain a little bit, go a little bit farther and read The Story of Mel.  I had to read the solution twice to get it.
• Nostalgia for the more open web of 10 years ago.  It’s true, and also makes me feel sad.  (via)
• Google60, Google via punchcard and printer.  It’s more stylistic than literal, but still fun.  (via)
• If you’re near San Francisco, a hackerspace there called Noisebridge wants more open source people – including BSD users – showing up.

Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Said the Gramophone and The New Shelton Wet/Dry.  The first one’s a music blog, and the second’s more general.  Both have a somewhat random feel with the images used – completely random in the New Shelton’s case.  It’s interesting that there’s such a flood of text and images on the Internet that you can reassemble content out of all of it.  You can’t push over a bookshelf and call it a library, but you can build a whole new narrative from random assembly of Internet data.