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by smallerdemon 976 days ago
57 pages in before we get a single screenshot. In a lot of ways, I miss this kind of weird ass writing about introducing people to computers with so little previous context to computing.

OTOH, 57 pages in before we start telling us how to use it seems like the fore bearer of 2023 recipes on web pages: "I love chocolate chip cookies. My mother used to make them for me back in 1970s after a day out in the late fall. My mother died in the late fall in 1986, and that is the year I set out to recreate my mother's cookie recipe for myself."
2 comments
Someone 976 days ago
The Mac itself was a lot better. It shipped with

- a “Guided Tour” floppy that contained a “Mousing Around” application that taught you to operate the mouse, for example by dragging a path through a maze.

- two audio cassettes “A Guided Tour of Macintosh” (https://archive.org/details/GuidedTourOfMacintoshAudioTape) and “A Guided Tour of MacWrite/MacPaint” (https://archive.org/details/GuidedTourofMacWriteMacPaint) that accompanied the “Guided Tour” disk (with prompts to keep the audio synchronized with what happened on screen)

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sowbug 976 days ago
Someone is sitting on the jumptorecipe.com domain. My fantasy is they're working on a simple website with recipes, and none of the babbling prose or instructive ads.

Reality is such a site probably can't make money, and I don't know why today's Google would bother even crawling it.

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bdavbdav 974 days ago
There was a chrome plugin, “Recipe Filter” which produced a beautiful recipe card to print or read from whatever site you threw at it. It worked really well.

The author got tonnes of backlash/abuse from people writing recipe sites.

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sowbug 974 days ago
Yeah, the site operators' perspective is that such an extension is same as an adblocker. But everyone else's perspective is that (a) they're hungry and (b) see (a).

Recipe sites aren't exactly high stakes, but they're one of the worst mismatches between the needs of customers and the business plans of providers. I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that solving the recipe-site problem is isomorphic to saving the web.

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