The USENET Cookbook: One of the earliest digital publications
Long before HTML or PDF... we had Emacs, plain text, and USENET. And it was glorious.
The good ole’ World Wide Web is filled to the brim with articles about the history of digital publishing.
… And every single one of them is wrong.
Just for fun: Go to your favorite search engine and type the words “History of digital publishing”. You will find articles claiming that “digital publishing” first started in the early 1990s. Or that digital publishing started in the early 1980s with articles written in HTML. Needless to say, neither of which are correct (not least of which because HTML didn’t even exist in the 1980s).
It’s almost as if every person attempting to write about digital publishing was born long after MTV stopped playing music videos.
In the interests of attempting to add just a small dash of actual factual information to the Internet… let’s take a few moments to talk about one of the first, wide-scale, digital publications:
The USENET Cookbook
In 1985 — many years before the first HTML Web browser — Brian Reid began a project that was, in essence, an experiment in digital publishing.
A cookbook (the kind you use to make food). Published and coordinated via USENET.
In his 1987 whitepaper “The USENET Cookbook: an experiment in electronic publishing”, Reid describes it thusly:
Much of the research taking place in the field called "electronic publishing" would perhaps be better called "electronic printing" or "electronic typography" or "electronic drawing" or "electronic file cabinets". The word "publishing" has traditionally meant "to make generally known" or "to disseminate".
Reid is correct there. In the early 1980s, when people talked about digital or electronic publishing… they were really talking about ways that computers could be used in the workflow of publishing traditional (read: physical, printed) magazines, newspapers, or books.
Reid continues…
In December 1985 I began a venture in true electronic publishing, "true" in the sense that its primary goals were to explore electronic dissemination rather than electronic typesetting or formatting. I wanted to start a periodical that could be distributed electronically, that would use computers for every aspect of its production and distribution process, that would be on a topic of wide enough interest that I could get subscribers in as many countries as possible, and that was on a topic that I would find sufficiently interesting to be able to maintain interest in it long enough to get substantial experience.
No printing necessary. No publishing companies. No warehouses full of copies. No need for distributors or bookstores.
Everything on computers. From conception to editing to distribution to reading.
This was, as wild as it seems from the point of view of 2022, quite revolutionary.
The obvious topic was cookery. I began a weekly magazine whose contents are recipes. To submit a recipe for publication, a prospective author mails the recipe to the editor by electronic mail. The publishing process from that point is fairly similar to more ordinary magazines
The “USENET Cookbook” had roughly 13,000 subscribers — and 300 contributors — with editing handled via Emacs.
The distributed, weekly publication was then run through a processor application in order to properly format it for display or printing. The end result tended to look something like this:
Reid detailed the workflow and publishing process in his whitepaper, which is an absolutely fascinating read if you are interested in early digital publishing or the pre-Web Internet.
Was the USENET Cookbook the very first digital publication?
No. There were others.
But it was the first that met all of the following:
Created, published, and read entirely on computer.
Distributed via the Internet.
With a significant, widespread base of readers.
And, thanks to Reid, it is the first where the process is documented in detail — a benefit for both general historical purposes, and (more specifically) to fully understand how the entire field evolved during the 80s and 90s.
Some fun facts about the legendary Brian Reid:
Created the Scribe markup language and word processing system in the late 1970s / early 1980s.
Worked on the creation of the original SUN Workstation at Stanford in the early 80’s.
Helped develop what is generally considered to be the first Internet firewall while working at Digital Equipment Corporation. It was named “Gatekeeper”… because of the movie Ghostbusters. (Which is awesome.)
The famed hacker, Kevin Mitnick, regularly pretended to be Brian Reid when attempting to gain the trust of others.
Was director of of the Network Systems Laboratory at Digital during the development of the famed AltaVista search engine.
A huge thanks to Brian Reid for his amazing work in this field. To say he was a pioneer in networked computers would be a vast understatement.
Mr Reid, if you happen to read this, I just want to personally thank you for helping to shape so much of what I, and so many others, do.
One other interesting story about Brian Reid (of oh so many) involves Google.
Brian Reid was the Director of Operations for Google before the company went public. He was fired by Larry Page after Urs Hölzle stated that Brian Reid was “too old to matter”. (Technically, I believe, it was his ideas that were stated to be “too old to matter”… but the inference seems clear to me.)
The firing occurred just 9 days before Google went public. Costing Reid millions upon millions of dollars.
This resulted in a suit against Google, for obvious age discrimination, that was eventually settled out of court.
Brian Reid is an absolute legend in the computing world. A pioneer who made vast portions of the computer industry possible.
Google, on the other hand, has a long, well documented track record of firing people — including computer industry pioneers — for extremely uncool, discriminatory, juvenile reasons.
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I have at least one recipe in the USENET Cookbook