PurplePaste

One Christmas, when I was about seven years old, I received this fantastic book as a gift from my aunt and uncle. As I recall, it's pretty short on detail, but full of incredible full-page photos featuring robotic arms, glowing amber CRTs, and fiber-optic cables, all lit with a healthy dose of neon light and Tron-inspired backdrops (it was the eighties, after all). This book pre-dated the arrival of our first home PC (a Tandy 1000) by several years, but it did cement the idea in my mind that computers, however foreign and complex they appeared to be at the time, were pretty intriguing.

I have high hopes that I might find this book again, buried under piles of useless crap that I haven't touched in years, in what used to be my old closet at my parents' house. If not, I may shell out the penny (plus $3.99 shipping) for a used copy on Amazon. I think I could find a not too ironic spot for it on my bookshelf at work, right between Mastering Regular Expressions and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.