The red one ended with an epilogue, because a decade that has finished can be epilogued. This edition cannot end that way: its subject is still shipping firmware updates. So it closes instead the way a register should — by staying open. Of the 474 machines enrolled in these pages, 128 are still owed a proper spec sheet by their own manufacturers, a sentence the 1993 research department would not have believed: the brochures used to arrive by post, glossy, unasked-for, and complete. Today the spec sheet is a web page that quietly rounds its own numbers, and first-copy-out times have become a trade secret. Progress is not required to be linear.

What happens next is partly the reader’s business. The archive at photocopier.gethryn.com holds both registers — the 409 machines of the golden decade and the 474 of the present one — and takes corrections, memories, photographs and spec sheets through the front page. Did you run one of these? Did you sell one? Are you, at this moment, standing next to one that refuses to authenticate you? The register wants to hear about it.

The next issue, whenever the filing justifies it, already has its shape: the machines announced this year will have shipped, the erasable-toner question will have resolved itself one way or the other, and at least one nameplate on the cover of this issue will probably not survive to appear on the next. The register does not speculate about which. The register files what happens, when it happens, with a source.

Until then: two editions, one shelf, one filing discipline. The briefcase would be proud, and slightly alarmed at the file sizes.