The figure on the cover of Dependency Injection is captioned "Le Créole de Cayenne," a descendent of colonialists in French Guiana, an overseas region of France located in South America. Cayenne is the capital of French Guiana. The city stands on a former island at the mouth of the Cayenne River on the Atlantic coast. The illustration is taken from a 19th-century edition of Sylvain Maréchal's four-volume compendium of regional and world dress customs published in France. Each illustration is finely drawn and colored by hand.

The rich variety of Maréchal's collection reminds us vividly of how culturally apart the world's towns and regions were just 200 years ago. Isolated from each other, people spoke different dialects and languages. In the streets or in the countryside, it was easy to identify where they lived and what their trade or station in life was just by their dress.

Dress codes have changed since then and the diversity by region and nation, so rich at the time, has faded away. It is now hard to tell apart the inhabitants of different continents, let alone different towns or regions. Perhaps we have traded cultural diversity for a more varied personal life–certainly for a more varied and fast-paced technological life.

At a time when it is hard to tell one computer book from another, Manning celebrates the inventiveness and initiative of the computer business with book covers based on the rich diversity of regional life of two centuries ago, brought back to life by Maréchal's pictures.