For another example of a manual that employs humor, check out the Tigerfibel. This is the users manual for the Tiger tank, and is easily one of the most effectively designed books ever. As well as humor, it employs comic book style drawings next to photos, poetry, analogy and even a bit of nudity.
There are lots of great little training films from the past. In WWII especially they had to bring in a lot of people with little experience with the sophisticated new technologies that were often only developed during the war. Search Youtube for phrases like "world war II training films".
Some examples:
https://youtu.be/gwf5mAlI7Ug - (Mechanical Computers) U.S. NAVY BASIC MECHANISMS OF FIRE CONTROL COMPUTERS MECHANICAL COMPUTER INSTRUCTIONAL
I would have never expected a tank training manual to have so many naked breasts. Otoh given the audience at the time were young men in their prime this method of stimulating the reader is kind of obvious.
In the 1980s, there were a lot of microcomputer books heavy on cartoons and jokes and gentle introduction. As an adult, I've learned there was also (what seems like) a large intersection with counterculture, hippies, etc.
Another interesting thing was how unpolished and DIY some of the documentation. For example, I got a vintage (circa Apple II?) Anadex dot matrix printer at a yard sale, and the manual included instructions for how to select the kind of serial interface (between, e.g., RS232 and closed-loop): by cutting a PCB trace inside. Not even a DIP switch, but they were fine telling customers it was OK to start permanently mangling a circuitboard to get it to work with their computer.
The North American owner's manual for the BMW E30, which being an 80s car would have been contemporary with the Franklin Ace, has a similar humorous admonition:
> Caution: Although the ABS is very effective, always remember that braking capability is limited by tire traction. Always adjust your driving speed according to the road and traffic conditions. Do not let the extra safety afforded by the ABS tempt you taking extra risk. The ABS cannot overcome the laws of physics.
As general commentary, I don't mind a bit of humor and personality in manuals, but I do mind when manuals become overly cute so as to start obfuscating or taking away from the concepts. A manual is there for me to learn how to do something, and it shouldn't be an opportunity for the author to force their creative writing on users.
Those early ACEs and the Apple's lawsuit were before my time, but then I live in a former USSR satellite state, so we were 10-15 years behind, tech-wise. Growing up in the 90s, I've seen plenty of similar humor and illustrations in various computer books, and I believe the reason for them was the same as in the US in the 80s: personal computers were new.
Computers were a completely new category of appliance, never seen before, alien. Most people in the market for them were first-time buyers, who didn't know anything about these machines, or what to do with them - at best, maybe they had a friend at local university or in some office that worked with them. Those people (or, perhaps in most cases, their kids) had to learn not just the operating basics (where the power button is, where you plug peripherals in), but completely new abstractions and conceptual frameworks - files and folders, data vs. code, CLI interfaces, later GUI interfaces. Clicking. Double clicking. It was overwhelming, and whether learning was worth it wasn't obvious.
Thus, all these cutesy drawings, all that humor and personality and conversational tone, served a critical function: to defuse the apprehension people had. To make the reader feel safe. "Sure, the computer seems like a complicated beast, but it's more of a friendly, if a little silly, pet you'll want to befriend. Yes, it's often frustrating, we feel that too. But look, now you know how to use it, and nothing broke. Wasn't that hard, was it?".
The generation of my parents needed that. My generation grew up exploring them on our own. The next generation was born to a world in which computers were ubiquitous, and learned from osmosis. So the manuals could go back to their usual, boring, utilitarian style we all love when we're not deadly afraid of the once-in-a-lifetime conceptual framework shift.
The US/UK angle was that home computing was subversive, playful, anti-corporate, and empowering. It was a very Boomer view, and this kind of tech writing epitomises it. Smalltalk, BBS culture, and super-affordable UK machines like the ZX Spectrum all come from a similar place.
There has always been a tendency of authors to inject a lot of themselves into technical content, which is charming to some and anathema to others. And I would guess in the 80's people felt subversive and "not square" writing like this, too. There's a lot of it.
Starting FORTH is like this, and I love that book, but I can see how it would have irritated a lot of people from the era it was written in.
I like Starting Forth. I think it strikes a good balance, but it is more of a tutorial than a manual or reference. Although, a good manual should probably contain tutorials.
They would've thought that the main customer was losing interest in the manual, but what they don't realize is that the people who are reading the manual require knowledge - not humor or useless information.
It is implying that adding odd mysteries to the documentation would engage the readers curiosity and make them read it more carefully than they otherwise would With the trick being that the odd structure may not be solvable and it's only reason for inclusion was to make the reader take interest.
The enlightenment comes when you spot the trick and realized you now know more about an otherwise boring subject than you would have had you only skimmed the manual.
Same here, and curiously as to how GP phrased it, I did skim it the first time - only upon reading the ending I was prompted to re-read the whole story properly.
It must be fun (and also profitable) to design a microcomputer back in the 80s. You can feel the love poured into even a copycat product. The early gaming consoles too I guess. Nowadays only a few companies can afford that pleasure. I wish modern 8/16-bit machines could bring back the homebrew glory but apparently they are still quite niche.
I'm going to add that I don't think Rpi is a good substitution for 8/16 bit machines. It's difficult to go to the bottom of things (except for Pico) and when you do go to the bottom it is too complicated to wrap your head around it. 8/16-bit machines such as NES/Apple/SNES/8086 are easier to "digest". I read on HN that some good console programmers can map the whole memory into his brain.
Resource constraint is really a boon, not a curse.
You can have all sorts of fun with an ESP32 or Teensy. They're cheap 32 bit microcontrollers with very high clock speeds and can emulate an 8 bit microprocessor but also have a nice SDK and run a real OS (FreeRTOS). Also https://mega65.org/
I was sold on the Teensy after seeing an incredible synthesizer someone created with it. So much power in such a tiny and affordable package. It’s pretty incredible what we can do with so little at the moment. Maybe it’s been this way for a while — I’m just discovering the world of microcontrollers over the last couple of years.
You are extremely unrealistic and I don't believe it will be fine for one second if they express frustration and quit, because you will be resentful that they didn't appreciate your plan. I started with even older machines, 8 bit, and I can tell you right now a 386 or even a 486 is not realistic. You seriously propose to sit them in front of a CRT and expect them to teach themselves Pascal and to find something useful to do with it on an antique? It'll be a challenge on its own to find new floppy disks.
If you want them to enjoy what they're doing, you can show them something else more modern and useful like maybe how to use the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi or something to turn things on or off. If you make computing into a weird punishment all you'll end up achieving is guaranteeing disappointment.
I don't know why you call it punishment. My plan is to use a similar machine side by side. I'll definitely go over the basics with them. And there are going to be some game floppies for fun. There are still 3.5 around and I can buy an external drive to write games in on my personal laptop.
Since this is the first computer he encounters, he doesn't have anything easier to compare with. As I said if he frustrates out then it's fine, I'll give him maybe a Rpi then, nothing big deal, but if he can grit through the initial period I prepare to teach him QuickBasic first and then C if he is interested, all about game programming. It was the way kids in the 80s learned programming and I think the only obstacle is his lack of interest/intelligence and access to easier electronics.
So, since you have a limited window to work with where the kid can't see how the modern world is today, this will be a 2 year old learning basic and/or C on a 486? Their brains aren't ready for that kind of cognitive development at that age. You were a lot older back in the 80s and weren't exposed to people or society with much better stuff. Kid is going to see that dad forces them to use a 33 year old machine with poor resolution graphics and sound and is slow as molasses.
Let me frame this differently. Your father or grandfather cut the grass with a sickle. Why aren't you doing the same thing? You can buy a sickle even now. Yet, you presumably use an electric or gas mower. Why not a sickle?
Because a sickle sucks and it was fine for the time. Not now.
PS. After a kid has frustrated out, it's already too late. You're never getting them back because they've already decided they hate it. Lots and lots of kids with parents who wanted to live through them again or wanted them to be a clone of the parent, and these kids rebelled against their planned lives. Same thing with parents who force their kids to eat a food that they've already expressed that they do not like the taste of it. They don't suddenly start liking the food when they are older. Listen to what they're saying, don't force it. This isn't the army.
You have a point. I need to think through about this experiment. I still hope he has a chance to touch at least some of the lower level stuffs at the beginning though. Also I won't start from two years old for sure, probably from 8/9 just as I did. It could be still too early so I need to observe his progress.
flicking through the article i saw mention of the "reset" button on the keyboard - this was my least favourite feature of the 8-bit computers such as the apple ][ and the bbc micro - one slip of your finger often meant lost work. actually having a reset button was a good thing - just don't put it on the keyboard.
The BBC Microcomputer had an "Escape" key and a potentially misleadingly named "Break" key - but "Break" was actually more like a reset key (with CTRL-Break being a "harder" reset and SHIFT-Break prompting the computer to boot off a floppy disk).
But one nice feature was that if you were simply programming in BASIC and immediately typed OLD after hitting "Break", you had a chance of recovering your program if you weren't unlucky.
And the other feature which this comment reminded me of - at least some models of the BBC Micro had a hardware lock on the "Break" key, so with a small screwdriver you could turn a little piece of plastic to completely prevent the key being pressed!
That was a nice feature of the Atari 800. Reset button is off to the side away from the keyboard. With little plastic risers / borders above and below it to further reduce the chance of accidentally hitting it. Even though I was a very clumsy kid, I don't think I ever inadvertently reset it. Which means it worked well in my sample size of 1.
On the original Apple ][, the reset key was indeed just a regular key that was easy to press. On later models (the ][ plus, I think) Apple used a spring for the reset key that required a higher force to depress it. Finally, on the Apple //e, you had to press Control+Open Apple+Reset to reset the machine... but I have no idea if Franklin did anything special to the reset key on their Apple clone.
It's worth pointing out that this was very much by design. Reset on the Apple II was a warm reset. It provided the ability to break out of a hung, spinning or otherwise misbehaving program and get back to the boot-time monitor prompt in a state where your live in-memory work wasn't lost.
Remember the original computer didn't have a disk yet. The only storage was a cassette tape operating at 6000 baud. You didn't hack on it by editting a text file and then compiling it from storage, you programmed in-memory (either in BASIC or by hand-assembling instructions at the monitor). Then you tried it, and if it worked you started worrying about how to get that pickled to storage in a recoverable way.
It was a different world, and "reset" was absolutely a critical feature.
But yeah, fast forward a few years and the median user was "running" software and not writing it, and we all forgot about why it was there.
The RESET key is so well-hidden it's not even visible in the first picture. In the second picture, you can see the notch along the back of the keyboard near the numeric keypad. In the third picture, with the cover removed, you can how the key extends backward at a perpendicular angle.
You're never going to hit that thing by mistake. You might not even realize it exists until someone points it out to you.
On the first Mac, you had to attach the hardware for the reset ‘key’ yourself, if you wanted one. See photo “3 of 3” on https://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/search/object/nma... for the part you had to insert. The two ‘prongs’ reached two switches for NMI and reset inside the Mac.
It was just ctrl-reset for the reset button. Ctrl-open apple-reset was a hard reboot. But since open apple was aliased to one of the paddle buttons, you could accidentally trigger a hard reboot if you happened to have something sitting on top of the paddles that you weren’t using.
yes, i think that the trend was to make it harder to reset, but why not simply have a reset switch? my dragon32 (6809 processor) has one on the back and the research machines 380zs (z80 processor) had an illuminated switch on the front of the steel case of the brute, which reset and dumped you into the front panel/machine-code debugger. oh, those happy days.
Weird illustrations and humor and pretty eclectic and very opinionated coverage, from hardware to different operating systems to CS concepts, and the author said you could call him at home for free tech support if you bought the book. (I never tried that part, though.)
Heh, we had a Franklin Apple II clone in high school (in the Netherlands). It's what the pupils who had graduated from using the Newbrain class computers were allowed to use. Not that we got access to the manual, of course.
At first, computer lessons were, of course, given by the maths teachers, but they got bored with the things, and then Dutch language teachers took over, with rather more success.
(I ended up writing a school results tracking database for the Franklin computer, and after that, the computer was moved into the office, and I never saw it again.)
The Apple manuals also had a sense of whimsy about them as well. I learned “defenestrate” from the glossary at the back of one of the Apple ][ manuals. I also seem to remember other jokes scattered throughout the manual including the index.
I had a very early Apple //e (purchased 1983) and remember some funny things in the manuals. There was a glossary entry for Write-Only Memory. This contained an entire brief story about how it had been invented by a Prof. Farnsfarfle(?) and subsequently used to store some huge amount of surplus government data.
“Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window” is a famous Woz quote. It is not really surprising to have something along those lines in an Apple ][ manual.
It is funny in the context of a glossary otherwise composed of computer terms. Their definition, incidentally, was “to throw something or someone out of a window.”
Reminds me of some early Bungie games, which would have files called 'DONT_EVER_READ_THIS_FILE.txt", or something to that effect. The files, of course, were the readme files, named that way to trick people into reading them.
>Back when hiring artists and writers meant going to actual creative writing
Not always. In the 80's,a lot of people in my country, Spain, were self-taught. They loved computers but they also loved reading books and lots of comic books.
In the 90's if you were into computers it wasn't weird to be a fanfiction writer or manga sketcher to copy some Dragon Ball drawings.
I'm known for writing documentation that is useful AND, let's say, entertaining. Or, depending on your inclination, sed 's/entertaining/hilarious/g'
Besides docu and Wiki pages (what unfortunately counts for docu in many companies), I've written man pages and shell scripts with more jokes than a longint can probably count.
Once had a shell script that did something really, really impactful and asked the user in increasingly aggressive prompts if he is sure, then delved into existentialism and how he can even be sure that he is so sure. Another prompted the unfortunate victim to validate that gravity, in fact, still works. Long story.
Some have deemed that "unprofessional", especially management. I am elated to see that this has precedence in print, and shall use this to make my case.
Oh, I have writing samples available. If anyone wants to hire a guy to write funny manuals or some other stuff, ping me :D
> Once had a shell script that did something really, really impactful and asked the user in increasingly aggressive prompts if he is sure, then delved into existentialism and how he can even be sure that he is so sure
Please share!
> Oh, I have writing samples available. If anyone wants to hire a guy to write funny manuals or some other stuff, ping me :D
Would you consider doing the same for a fun free software project that just aim to share knowledge about how http works?
Sorry, I left said shell script at a company I have now departed from.
As for the other thing, not at this time. Again, truly sorry! I'm a bit overwhelmed in my life right now, maybe some later time. But can you send me a link to the project nonetheless, if there is one?
On page 10, there is a suggestion to enter "STUERBPORAIYSIES!", then enable double-size mode. I can't find any reference for that anywhere. I wonder what it does?
It looks like in double-size mode, every other character is dropped. The manual text hints at the result. "Something strange? Well, just for fun, press CLEAR then type STUERBPORAIYSIES. Now press SHIFT ->. Surprised?"
> It’s a little late to bring it up now, but a good rule of thumb to keep in mind is that you shouldn’t buy a computer unless you know of at least two things that you can use it for BEFORE you buy it.
I guess this should also be a question to ask anybody looking to buy a high end computer today: "Sir, before you buy this, please name two uses of this computer which cannot be done by a $400 PC."
I actually thought the same thing, and then I found a really cheap printer ($75 all included) at my local big box store. I am way passed the 10 projects mark (not counting benchies and 3D printer parts) and bought a more capable printer.
Most of what I print are publicly available models, but some of them I did myself.
What I have done: shower head support, various boxes, curtain hooks, phone stand, drain filter, novelty dices, etc... Most of these I would never have thought of before I got my printer, and yet, these are actually useful stuff. For example, for the curtain hooks, before I had the 3D printer, I had to buy some that didn't quite fit because the original one that broke are not available anymore, and sometimes, they fell. The new ones I printed to measurements fit perfectly. That's the idea, you need something, you print it. Of course, there are many things you can't print or it makes no sense to, but it really is useful.
Also I originally underestimated PLA, it is actually quite strong. There are even ways of making it heat resistant (regular PLA starts to deform at around 60C, which can happen in a hot car).
That being said, it is still a hobby. 3D printers, especially the cheap ones are far from consumer friendly and you need to be familiar with its workings and how to setup your slicer. And there is the big one: CAD. You can limit yourself to printing others people models, but you would be missing on a lot of potential.
That's a very wrong mindset, in my opinion. Before I bought a printer, I had zero things I wanted to print. Now that I know how to design and print things, you can't walk two steps around the house and not find a 3D printed thing.
It's not just baubles, either, each thing improves my life somehow. To the holder of the falling toilet seat, to the toothbrush holder, to the sink sponge case.
And the argument of "couldn't you go to the store to get some of those things" is the same as saying "couldn't you go to the laundromat to wash your clothes"? Yes I could, but once you're used to the convenience and speed, you'll never go back.
Referring to programs that actively resist being backed up:
This may be a user's manual, but when it comes to some programs that you buy off the shelf, you're more in a position of being used than you are of being a user.
Reminds me of the modern "you are the product" adage, and shows user-hostile software was already a thing 40 years ago.
It’s a shame that there aren’t really anyone in the same vein as Douglas Adams (clever, witty, enthusiastic when he wants and cutting when he needs, and overpoweringly nerdy).
Reading some of his articles the other day (written for MacUser), there was no negativity, no angst, no flame war (but a healthy dose of irony); just pure enthusiasm about the cool new things we could do with the cool new computers and assorted gizmos. We could use more of that.
"Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby" definitely needs to included in this conversation. Not only is the text strange, there is a crazy amount of comic book illustration and sidebars with it.
US copyright law still explicitly permits copying programs you lawfully acquired for backup and use.
Frankly it’s not clear to me how that interacts with the anti-circumvention clause of the DMCA, but most software licenses are based on an outright lie: that you need a license to load the program into memory and execute it after having legally acquired the code.
The Franklin Ace 1000 was my first computer. I already used Apples at school, and it was just an Apple clone. Between that and the general "if all else fails, read the instructions" attitude that my Dad had already passed on to me, I don't recall recall looking at the manual very much.
I recall there was a whole paragraph written about the sound command and that 20Hz was the resonant frequency of a chicken's head, discovered empirically.
Borland did seem to be a playful company in contrast to Microsoft, their main rival.
One of the Netscape Navigator manuals was fairly entertaining as well. Had to explain what the internet was as well. I mainly remember a Northern Exposure reference.
I sense, possibly, that while this manual is weird and charming to us, it might have been highly frustrating to the audience it thought it was writing for. I’ve sometimes found that there’s a big difference between a “beginner” and “an engineer’s idea of a beginner.” That might explain all their “tone down” changes in the later version.
> And then, on page 40, there is a chapter called “The Ancestral Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan.” That’s a really strange chapter to put in a computer manual.
The real joke of ‘Territorial Imperatives of the Trumpeter Swan’ was in its acronym.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tigerfibel
https://archive.org/details/Der-Generalinspekteur-der-Panzer...