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The Soul of Maintaining a New Machine
Books in Progress is what we call a “public drafting tool”: Drafts will be made available for comment from the public, allowing for direct collaboration between author and reader.
That meant, says Orr, that “the customer must be initiated into the technicians’ community of discourse,” 6 complete with an understanding of how the machine worked, how to recognize the noises it made at the various stages of copying, and the correct language to describe its many failure modes. On the “Xerox Nostalgia” website, technicians remember it as “a dog in terms of reliability,” “a beast,” “an electromechanical monster, and dirty,” “a nightmare to keep it working,” “I hated this product!” “I still suffer from two 4000-induced medical conditions: ‘4000 knees’ and ‘A-transport replacement lower back pain’!” and “I got quite proficient on the 4000/4500 and was once told by a Leesburg trainer that an experienced 4000 rep could fix anything. Other authors I’ve relied on are John Seely Brown & Paul Duguid, Daniel Bobrow & Jack Whalen, plus Olivier Rainman, David Bell, Mark Shirley, Cindy Gordon, Robert Cheslow, Norman Crowfoot, Steve Barth, Yutaka Yamauchi, and Andrew Cox.)
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