Computers have changed a lot in the last several decades, but I think the intended audience for their documentation has changed a lot more:
As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector…. Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge of the hyper-cube.
Imagine a world in which “I know, I’ll compare this to a 4-dimensional hypercube” is a reasonable thought.
1 Note that “4-27” is the twenty-seventh page of chapter four, not a range. I wouldn’t have numbered the pages that way—but then my go-to analogy also wouldn’t be “four dimensional hyper-cube,” I guess.)
I’d never really thought about it, but this from Mat Duggan is absolutely true for me:
[O]ne big monitor is a a different experience entirely compared to 2 smaller monitors. I don’t use the two monitors as one large unbroken screen, I tend to use one of them for “less important static content” like a ToDo list or my work chat tool and my email and then the “primary” monitor for my terminal/tmux/browser which is how I do all my actual work. But windows “belong” to one or they “belong” to another. Grudin found in 2001 that people use a second monitor exactly this way, where focal work on one, peripheral glances on the other. Twenty-five years ago. The OS still doesn’t know which monitor is doing one role and which the other.
The whole thing is about his ideal UI, and I haven’t done more than skim it, but it definitely seems interesting.