thanks:
John Batelle
Elizabeth Dunn
Ian Ferrell
James Glave
James Joaquin
Kevin Kelly
Jane Metcalfe
Judith Regan
Louis Rossetto
Nathan Shedroff
Michael Tchao
Ian Verchere
• In the book, there are:
1) a page full of what looks like random characters;
2) two pages of nothing but ones and zeros;
3) two pages of more random-looking characters; and
4) several pages where one word is repeated over and over.
These have been mostly deleted and noted in the text. (See below for more about this.)
• I separated all the paragraphs with blank lines. Where there were section spaces (i.e. a space between paragraphs with the next paragraph beginning with a drop cap in the physical book), I put three asterisks (* * *) in front of the next section.
• The book employs many typographical techniques - different font sizes and weights and justification - that are impossible to duplicate in plain text. (The "best" ebook of this would probably have to be in PDF format. HTML would come close, but it'd take a lot of work.)
• Mispelled words in the emails between Dan and Abe are original text. (Didn't their email clients have spell checkers back in '93? Or would a true geek just turn it off?)
• The book is full of easter eggs - the random-looking pages mentioned above.
- The 1's and 0's on pages 104-105 decode to a poem.
- The random-looking text on pages 308-309 (consonants on page 308; vowels on page 309) are actually Patty Hearst's "ransom note" from the late 70's.
- I haven't confirmed this yet, but the random text on page 20 sure looks like something UUencoded.
For more about this, see a fan's web page about the book at:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Gallery/5560/coupmicr.html
• I was thinking of putting hard CR/LF's at the end of each 72-character line in the text version. But, PC's, Macs, and Unices all use different EOL markers. So fergeddabout it. Straight PalmDOC to TXT conversion it is.