Sometimes gifts can be immaterial, made only to honor the recipient. Other times, they are simply about the act of creating the gift, merging recipient and sender. Regardless, they offer a new path of traversing the internet, following a path of love and close, dedicated attention.

ong leash within a narrow fence

Edison built his own style of dogged experimentation into the culture of his lab. Since the lab was meant to scale Edison, this makes perfect sense; he was a man with far more ideas than hands. So, he hired more hands. Edison did not search far and wide to hire the world’s best research minds, and many of those he employed did not even have scientific backgrounds. This didn’t matter much to Edison because most of them were employed to undertake courses of research that he had directed them to pursue.

On top of Edison’s admirable approach to experimentation, he brought a high level of practicality to his process. He knew his inventions needed to make commercial sense in order to make it out of the lab. So, even in early courses of experimentation, he kept factors like manufacturability in mind. He wouldn’t commit much time to something that didn’t make commercial sense. With that being said, Edison wanted to change the world with his technologies more than he wanted to get rich. So, the practical factors he paid aggressive attention to were primarily treated as constraints. He did not optimize for profitability, but he knew his ideas needed to be profitable. Nobody who wanted to optimize for profit would have pursued lighting in the way Edison did. The technical risks were too great.

They had been at it for almost a year, and they had written more code than would fit in the 64 Kbytes of memory in a standard Apple II. In fact, the Apple II only had 48 Kbytes on its main board, but it used a "language" card to give it an extra 16 Kbytes used to run Pascal.

Unfortunately, the experiment seemed to permanently damage the print-head; it burned out or possibly melted some of the thermal elements. The printer could no longer print text or graphics, but it still was able to set the paper on fire, so I kept it around for the occasional incendiary demo.