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Fifty Years of Diff
June 14, 2024 The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals.
Most details of the con stant questioning and experimentation during the early period of rapid change are long forgotten, as are hundreds of transitory states that were recorded in the on-line manual. Quite contrary to commercial practice, where a release is supposed to mark a stable, shaken-down state of affairs, the very act of preparing a new edition often caused a flurry of improvements simply to forestall embarrassing admissions of imperfection.” I wrote a little addon that would light up when it detected a contribute.json file and show it to you, something that might rekindle the spirit of View Source from before frameworks, wire-compressed JS and corporate metrics had so thoroughly alienated webdevs from the idea of a collaborative audience.
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