A few weeks/months before _why published this book, this page appeared on his "public print queue" on his site, hinting that the print queue would become active on April 18: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/DESO...

A day or two before April 18, this page appeared containing a hand-written OCaml script you could use to hook up your own printer to _why's public print queue: https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/HOME...

On April 18, a bunch of us gathered in an IRC chat room (https://viewsourcecode.org/why/CLOSURE/ircLog.html). A few of us got the script working on our machines, and so every 10-15 minutes our printers would suddenly start up and print the next page as _why slowly published them one at a time throughout the day. Steve Klabnik gathered all the pages into one PDF and gave it the name "CLOSURE".

This article does a good job of giving more context around the book itself (as well as a partial summary): https://kev.town/2013/04/30/why-did-why-the-lucky-stiff-quit...

I am still kinda sad that the only place I kept the video of my printer printing out pages was Vine. Oh well.

EDIT: I am now realizing that, ironically, maybe that is appropriate...

As far as I can tell, many (all?) Vine videos are still available if you have the link

Oh wow! Okay hmmm, thank you, I will see what I can do...

I like to think he addressed this when he reappeared a few years later:

"Now I want to make it perfectly clear that these papers and all my other works in life belong to the general public. In fact, I also would like to turn myself over to all of you as well. This was actually done several years ago, but in an embarrassingly disorganized manner." - https://github.com/steveklabnik/CLOSURE/blob/master/PDF/DISC...

The entire tutorial has been translated to Rust: https://www.philippflenker.com/hecto/

Kilo has also been ported to many other languages, including Go, Python, Java: https://github.com/search?q=kilo+text+editor