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I recently discovered that during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s it was common to draw large panoramic views of cities. The Library of Congress has a huge collection of them available on their website. Some of these maps are incredibly detailed. They show each house on every street, sometimes with enough detail to recognize certain homes.

Here is a close up of Kalamazoo’s downtown in 1883.  In the full view available from the LoC you can see that my neighborhood didn’t even exist yet.  The only roads in the area are Riverview, Gull, and East Main.  They are all major roads now, but they aren’t even labeled on this map.

Reprints of these maps on Amazon

Corrin and I dropped some stuff off at Goodwill the other day, and when we were looking around inside I made an amazing find.  For only two dollars, I purchased a pop-up book describing the internals of a 1980’s PC!  I’ve uploaded pictures of most of the book.  I left out a few of the more boring features, such as opening a floppy disk to see the mylar disc inside.  Sorry about the datestamps - I always forget to turn them off.

This pop-up computer greets you when you first open the book.  The text on screen says “Insert disk and close door.”  When you do, the text changes to a welcome message describing the purpose of the book.

When the tab at the bottom is pulled, the M key is depressed and the binary signal sent by the keyboard is shown.  The next two pictures are a binary and an ASCII decoder that are also on this page.

This page doesn’t have any interesting interactions.  There is a chip in a pocket on the opposing page that can be placed in the slots on the lower right.

The disc can be slid in, showing how it lines up with the read/write heads.

This is one of my favorite pages.  The electron ray is made of string, and pixels appear behind it as it shoots down the scan line.

This is the last page of the book.  Pulling the tab on the right moves the print head across the screen to reveal the word “Goodbye.”

Inside the Personal Computer: An Illustrated Introduction in 3 Dimensions on Amazon

Books by Sharon Gallagher - This Amazon search might find you some better priced copies than the one linked to above. It is only sold through Amazon partners, and they all seem to enter it in a little differently.

Welcome, StumbleUpon, reddit, Gizmodo and anyone else who ends up here!  If you liked this post, you might like the Most Expensive Pop-Up Books post I just made.