Sphere had an early, maybe the first, all-in-one personal computer that booted to a prompt and was ready to go at a time MITS was mostly selling flip-switch Altairs. Ben Zotto stumbled (literally) over the Sphere Computers story and accidentally wrote this book.
Thank you for these amazing comments and insight! One element I might not have emphasized as much in the linked piece is just how much of "team" you accidentally assemble. I project managed this for Marcin, but he hired other folks (proofreader and indexer) and commissioned some photography and 3D illustration. But beyond that, likely 100 people across our printer, the outside bindery (which did the hardcover binding), and the slipcase maker (an intensely handmade product as much as flawless as it might seem) were involved in bringing it to life. Then the many 1,000s or 10,000s of people who handled the books across the shipping process in the USPS and worldwide. Lots of people involved whenever you start working with pesky atoms.
100% agree. We looked at comparable books in terms of how they were pitched to an audience, size, quality, features (slipcase, color, binding, etc.), and went rather low on the retail price in the end, hoping to make it up with quantity, which happened!
Definitely looking at comparable projects helps you figure out potential final dollars you might raise, average rewards, and distribution of rewards.
Project manager and editor of the book here! Marcin has posted a lot of updates and newsletters about the printing process. It was fairly arduous to get the quality for the print run we did. Marcin hasn't disclosed the total, but you can tell through the Kickstarter campaign it was at least 4,500. Each of the book set’s hardcover volumes comprise 38 large sheets of paper printed on both sides, then 10 for the softcover volume 3, then sheets for the endpapers and covers and slipcase. Each of those sheets takes from an hour or two to much longer with the degree of attention we paid.
We spent about 100 hours on press with the printers across about eight days, sometimes 12 to 14 hours a day in July with 80°Fs and 90°Fs outside (the printing plant is conditioned somewhat for heat and humidity, and sometimes we had to stop printing for the day as it was just too hot).
It was glorious and exhausting. But we were almost at our physical limits for overseeing the print run and our printers were close to their ability to simply house the raw, printed, and then bound materials. This is an intensely physical object to its scale and the number of pieces.
It's possible to do this on an accrual basis, but when I have spoken at times to accountants about it, they have discouraged it: the IRS can be dubious, and it makes the most sense to run your business that way if you're entirely organized around it (i.e., you have a profound mismatch in your basic function between income and expense within calendar or fiscal years).
Author here: Thank you so much for the amazing work! I am still finding more Easter eggs. Tips to other readers: click on EVERYTHING on the desktop in the opening splash screen.
Author of the story here! I've been a writer and journalist for nearly 30 years, and with the giant shift of advertising from traditional and then web publications to apps, social networks, and product sites (Amazon makes a fortune from ads), the number of places that publish long-form features has shrunk quite a bit. The ones that remain often have a tech billionaire or heir helping to fund them or they're the last survivors.
I can't speak for Retool, of course, but it was pitched to me by my fabulous editor there as the company wanting to show the great visual editing tools of the past and make sure they weren't forgotten. They had already run a wildly fascinating story about Visual Basic, something I never thought I would be interested in, and it was riveting. There was no marketing involvement in the story at all. There's an interesting line where producing compelling editorial work shines a nice light on what you're doing as a company? Stripe published Increment for years, both online and in a very lovely print edition, and I wrote (for the same editor) for years for them until that no longer served Stripe's particular purpose for it. But it was all essentially independent editorial with nothing to do with Stripe's core mission.
On the production side, I didn't see much of how it would look until it went live, and I think it tells an incredibly robust story—it's a great parallel to my reporting in a way that I've rarely seen in my whole career?!
Nope, finally found it in the USB-C spec, section 4.6.2, covering cables: "USB Power Delivery in Standard Power Range (SPR) operation is intended to work over un- modified USB Type-C to USB Type-C cables, therefore any USB Type-C cable assembly that incorporates electrical components or electronics shall ensure that it tolerate, or be protected from, a VBUS voltage of 21 V."
This comes after a table that would seem to indicate USB-C as a whole supports a minimum of 7.5W, but then this cable-specific section expands that. However, it notes that it must tolerate or be protected from, which in this context I gather means "must pass power through."
I would love to find the citation outside of Wikipedia for the USB-C 60W requirement. Apple makes a USB-C charging cable that only does USB 2.0 but is capable of up to 100W. And you can find cables like this Belkin one that promise 15W: https://www.belkin.com/my/chargers/wall/usb-c-home-charger-u... But perhaps it’s out of spec?
I found it in the spec in section 2.1.5. (Referring to the May 19, 2021, clean revision of USB4 1.0.)
"A USB4 host or USB4 peripheral device can optionally support interoperability with Thunderbolt 3 (TBT3) products.
"A USB4 hub is required to support interoperability with Thunderbolt 3 products on all of its DFP . A USB4-Based Dock is required to support interoperability with Thunderbolt 3 products on its UFP in addition to all of its DFP.
"When interoperating with a TBT3 product, Thunderbolt Alt Mode is established on the link between products. The USB Type-C Specification describes how a USB4 product negotiates and enters Thunderbolt Alt Mode."
So, accurate!
However, my question is about major brands. Will Lenovo, Dell, etc., go for USB 4-only instead of USB 4/TB 4? I guess we'll find out.
But my understanding would be that a Thunderbolt 4 controller connected by a USB 4 cable to a USB 4-only device running USB 4 for 20 Gbps would still work through Thunderbolt 4’s backwards compatibility across all USB modes.
I just read through the USB-C spec, and the closest thing it says to 20V/3A minimum is in a chart that has a footnote:
"the USB Type-C specification requires that a Source port that supports USB BC 1.2 be at a minimum capable of supplying 1.5 A and advertise USB Type-C Current @ 1.5 A in addition to supporting the USB BC 1.2 power provider termination."
Is there a more explicitly states a minimum of 20V/3A? I may be misreading the table above this (Table 2-1).
Author of the article here—please do tell me more about the Thunderbolt 3 and USB 4 relationship. I used “basically” to hand wave over some of the detail, but would love to know how to dig down on this further. (And I welcome nit picks. Seriously! We just did a couple tweaks. Some folks who buy HDDs said they see 3.0 Micro-B all the time, and that is absolutely true, so we modified a sentence about that.)
I'm leaning a bit on three things:
• The USB-IF says that USB 4 is based on Thunderbolt 3 and incorporates Thunderbolt 3. If it's optional, they buried it in the spec? Would love to know where if you do so I can make that clearer. (See https://www.usb.org/usb4 for instance.)
• Apple’s USB 4/Thunderbolt 4 controller ostensibly incorporates all previous standards with backwards compatibility, so the question will likely arise in a specific case: a Thunderbolt 3 device with a Thunderbolt 3 controller attached to a USB 4 controller that isn’t a Thunderbolt 4 controller. In that case, the host computer’s USB 4 controller would have to negotiate down to 10 Gbps and USB 3.1 Gen 2? (???)
• In practice, I wonder which controller modules major brands besides Apple will adopt: it seems most likely they would want USB4/TB4 not USB 4-only?
Per the above about the lawyer, too, the USB-C Charging Cable Apple offers (no video, 480 Mbps USB 2.0 data, and up to 100W power) is absolutely the most maddening cable on the market.