First Edition - published in December 1983 as a Christmas present to family.
The first two editions were printed with a Radio Shack TRS 80 Model I computer using NewScript wordprocessing software output on an Okidata 8510 dot matrix printer. The format was 8 ½ by 6 landscape.
Second Edition – published in February 1983 after review and additions,
Link to sample pages from the second edition
This is a working copy with notes and comments to enhance and improve future editions.
The computers were 8 bit machines running at 4 MHz with 32 kB of ROM and 32 KB of working memory with 200 KB storage on floppy disks.
There is a huge gap between the 1983 publication and 1998 publication. This is due in part to life (jobs and other factors) taking p residence. It is also due in part to the fact that the recipe book was thought to be a one time effort. Advances in technology though opened up a whole new set of possibilities. Many new ideas were generated. The recipe book was a great way to experiment with these newer technologies and test out new ideas so the effort took on a whole new phase.
Third Edition - published in January 1998 includes many additions and enhancements
This was done with DeScribe word processing running under OS/2 and printed on a HP 5SI Laser Printer. Images were scanned using Impos. The format was 8 ½ by 6 but was changed to portrait.
Link to sample pages from this edition
This edition came about because Mother (Virginia Leipper) had filled her original book with numerous recipes hand written on any handy piece of paper including Girl Scout stationary and various note paper and also recipes clipped from other sources.
By this time the machines were 32 bit running at 400 MHz with 64 MB of working memory and 5 GB storage on hard drives. Star Office was taking over the word processing duties.
Fourth Edition published in November 1998.
A major change was to go from an 8 ½ by 6 format to an 8 ½ by 11 format . The change in page format came about because the the use of DeScribe facilitated better page management
This is a sample of the index of that edition. The recipe book includes indexes by cooks, by recipe source, and by ingredients
Fifth Edition – published in May 2003
This is the 20th anniversary of the recipe book. Motivation for this edition came from Janet Smith who suggested it would be a great wedding present for her daughter Brittany who was married to Tim Adair, June 21, 2003. A copy of this edition was sent to all immediate family members. Each book had a page naming the person to whom the book was given
This edition was also done in DeScribe. The big change in this edition was the inclusion of family photos throughout the book. These were photos of picnics, family, dinners and other food related activities.
Sixth Edition - Started in 2003 and continuing to this day.
By 2003 DeScribe had become an orphan. Using it with more current systems and software was becoming increasingly difficult. Therefore the decision was made to preserve the fourth edition by writing it to PDF files and also converting it to html files. The html files became the basis for the web version of the recipe book.
Link to the home page of the online
Leipper Family Recipe Book
We also used Star Office which became OpenOffice which became LibreOffice as a word processing platform. This allowed editing the html pages and otherwise used an open standard for documents that allowed for better page layout and book management than html. The operating system in use is Linux on standard personal computer hardware which now was running at 2 GHz with 16 GB working storage and 500 GB hard drive storage.