Cool project. I missed that sound. Hearing it again makes me realize how patient my folks were with my midnight debugging sessions…
On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)
If you're looking for this sense of nostalgia in book form, I highly recommend reading "LaserWriter II" by Tamara Shopsin [1]. It's 90s tech nostalgia wrapped in a concise narrative about a college student going to work at a computer repair shop.
I also recommend her memoir "Arbitrary Stupid Goal" [2] but that has a lot less tech nostalgia and just a lot of funny anecdotes about her family and their diner on the Lower East Side.
Just today at a shop I saw a self checkout terminal crash and reboot - featuring the old AMI boot screen and a nice POST beep. Made me wonder what ancient hardware might hide behind these modern cases and UIs.
On the other hand, when the author wanted to push Unicode on this, I felt old and immediately pictured Epsons old wire bound manuals outlining supported characters (a subset of ASCII if I recall)