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from the if-manuals-are-for-sissies,-who-are-automatics-for? dept.
Lancelot Braithwaite cannot get through my visit without bursting forth a mantra that once served him and thousands of consumers well: “Read the frickin’ instruction manual!” he bellows. “And don’t throw it out unless you’re pretty good at memorizing it!” Never mind that products—from iPhones to Facebook—have made manuals into curious artifacts of a distant era. That era is alive if not well in Braithwaite’s smokey, cramped one-bedroom on West 14th Street.
Before tech product reviewers were brand names, there was Braithwaite, thundering his wisdom and geekery from publications that now exist only in yellowing copies. It was a time when the best critics were so familiar with technical specifications that their knowledge rivaled the engineers who built the products. And none were as omnipresent or as savvy as Braithwaite, who even served on industry standards committees.
Manuals are for sissies.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 07 2017, @05:32PM (1 child)
I would agree with and extend along a different track that "real" techie type stuff has never avoided reading even if perhaps today's video game players aren't into manuals. Note that "when I was a kid" arcades existed as did the Atari 2600 and space invaders didn't exactly come with a 5000 page manual...
For example "doin EE stuf" I'm having a good time reading the data sheet for an AD9833 DDS frequency generator its extremely short for the genre a mere 27 pages and I'm enjoying every page.
As any old timer would tell you, if you don't want to tell a story in words and letters, bury it in a graph. So whats up with the SFDR being all "wiggly" and seemingly randomly dependent on Fmclk above 5 MHz or so? Please tell me I'm not going to have to manually switch refclocks to keep the noise level below 60 dB depending on selected freq output... please? Yeah yeah use a different device yeah yeah yeah. Probably will.
The above isn't even fiction, unfortunately. Going out on a third tack along the same path, WRT fiction there's a lot of "tech" people into scfi fi / fantasy and stuff like that. I'm pretty much an Asimov / Clarke reading completionist because I'm old, but I've read a lot of other stuff too.
(Score: 2) by requerdanos on Tuesday November 07 2017, @08:19PM
Page count aside, Atari 2600 Space Invaders had 224 different variations (112 numbered variations, each with two difficulty levels), all documented. So, the manual [atariage.com] wasn't exactly superfluous either.