A long time ago, in a universe far away, I wrote a book that (barely) catapulted me into the ranks of the thousandaires. Time passes, companies get sold / fail / merge / get bought, and eventually the final owners decided to remainder the book; the last royalty check I recall was for $2.88.
Anyhow, now that it’s discontinued and just as dead as the ISA bus, I own the copyright again and can do this:
- Embedded PCs ISA Bus – Ed Nisley.zip.odt
- ISA Bus Book Diskette.zip.odt (included in the book ZIP)
They’re both ZIP files, disguised as ODT files so WordPress will handle them. Just rename them to get rid of the ODT extension, unzip, and you’re good to go. Note, however, that I do retain the copyright, so if you (intend to) make money off them, be sure to tell me how that works for you.
The big ZIP has the original pages laid out for printing, crop marks and all, so this is not as wonderful a deal as it might first appear. The little ZIP has the files from the diskette, which was unreadable right from the start.
Words cannot begin to describe how ugly that front cover really is, but Steve’s encomium still makes me smile.
The text and layout is firmly locked inside Adobe Framemaker files, where it may sleep soundly forever. The only way I can imagine to get it back into editable form would be to install Windows 98 in a VM, install Framemaker, load up the original files, and export them into some non-proprietary format. Yeah, like that would work, even if I had the motivation.
If you prefer a dead-tree version, they’re dirt cheap from the usual used-book sources. Search for ISBN 1-57398-017-X (yes, X) and you’ll get pretty close.
Or, seeing as how I just touched the carton of books I’ve been toting all these years, send me $25 (I’m easy to find; if all else fails, look up my amateur callsign in the FCC database) and get an autographed copy direct from the source. Who knows? It might be worth something some day…
The back cover has some useful info:
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 