pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



coryw
@coryw

quickie for the night -- this is in part for @pendell but also for everyone

dunno if i mentioned this but i've been using vintage macs for a really long time and one of the things i discovered far too late but i love about the platform is apple's documentation.

for example: https://www.vintageapple.org/macmanuals/pdf/Macintosh_Users_guide_1992.pdf

this book would have been the second one that you encountered if you bought a mac at the time. the first would be a hardware set-up and reference guide which would show you how to physically set up the computer you'd bought, connect anything, install any option cards (a mandatory utility because 1985-1991 and then 1995-1997 there were macs without onboard graphics)

this second book, then, was basically "what do you do now that the computer is set up and turned on?" and covers a lot of, honestly, really foundational concepts, mostly without presuming you'll use the features of the OS in any one specific way.

it's worth paging through, even though most of us here are pretty good at computers, both becuse it shows a world where there wasn't that built-in presumption, and because it's a great look at the features in general of the OS at the time

this all got more sparse as time went on. the mac os 9 retail box and most computers by the late '90s had vanishingly little documentation, which is part of what gave (continued) rise to books like the dummies and missing manual series.

i guess the thing about this i like is... there didn't need to be a dummies manual for mac system 7 because apple wrote complete, helpful, non-presumptive documentation about the basics of the OS.

system 7 (but maybe later on like 7.5 in 1995) was the start of online help. the manual for 1995 power macintoshes condenses the "basics" (a 30-minute lesson in the 1992 book) into like... three pages.

(granted: i'm looking at the 1995 manual for a pro model, which makes a lot of presumptions about your history with the platform or your ability/desire to seek out new resources, it's possible the 1995 home computer manual was better about this.)

anyway, i guess this specifically is something that comes to mind once in a while because it feels like something people were excited to be learning in like 1997 and then that enthusiasm and interest in learning/teaching basic things faded away and now people are all surprised that navigating folder structures isn't common knowledge.


pendell
@pendell

The death of manuals and the art of proper documentation is a tragedy.


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