http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0762701455/forkrecommendedrA/
This book is literally the planet earth's version of the famed
hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, with short, informed essays on
everything from choosing guides to all forms of travel to finding great
rates to finding places to stay to equipping for a trip to what to do
when things go wrong (topics for that one include: theft, trouble with
the law, surviving a hijack, surviving a kidnap, surviving in
jungle/desert/cold, and my favorite: surviving a civil war).
Plus it's got 300 pages of directory, like an all-bits almanac.
Definitely a steal at Amazon's $7.50 off -- only 15 bucks plus shipping
and handling.
----
adam@cs.caltech.edu
While at MCI in 1983, building what was to become MCI Mail, Vint Cerf
tried to get IBM, Digital, and Hewlett-Packard to support TCP/IP, but
they refused and adopted OSI instead. Digital, in particular, had
invested a great deal of money in its DECNET network, based on OSI.
TCP/IP, they argued, was "a research thing." Cerf was disappointed and
a little irked. "They said they weren't gonna make products out of it.
So I had to build MCI Mail out of a dog's breakfast of protocols." Cerf
patched together MCI Mail from existing protocols that were being used
internally by Digital and IBM, and developed a few more specifically for
MCI Mail itself. "I understood why they took the position they did, but
it still bugged me."
-- Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, _Where the Wizards Stay Up Late_