‘Pop-up’ computer guide

Press, 1 June 1985, Page 20

‘Pop-up’ computer guide

inside the Personal Computer, by Sharon Gallagher: paper engineering by Van der Meer Paper Design. Abbeville Press, 1985. 12 pp. $28.95 “Paper engineering” is not too grand a term for the work in this unusual book — a “pop-up” volume designed to teach young and less young the ins and outs of the personal computer in an unusual graphic manner. The “pop-up” part of the enterprise is more complex than in children’s books using the same idea. Were this the book’s only merit, it could be dismissed as a clever gimmick. The writing, however, is also unusually good — clear, but simple and concise. It is a particularly fascinating exercise to hand this volume to a young person and see the manner in which it holds their attention, and the way in which they

quickly grasp what it is talking about. Every page opens to expose a complex computer model. On page one a complete computer springs up — with a disc drive that can be slid in and out. On following pages there is a keyboard with a moving key and moving switches and a calculator to explain binary numbering; the exposed insides of a computer with a (cardboard) microchip you can slip into one of the sockets, a disc drive complete with disc (you can open it and see what’s inside), and a printer which “prints” a farewell message. Gimmickry, yes. Because of it, the book is one of the best yet produced for teaching about computers in a very few pages, although it is far from being the cheapest. The book is produced in Singapore. Like all pop-up books, it is not sufficiently robust for the very young — A. J. Petre.