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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 looorg on Tuesday November 07 2017, @06:42PM (1 child)
God I miss the old Borland products, Turbo C, Asm, Pascal. You got a big paper box. The floppies and a pair of giant books that explained more or less everything you needed to know about the products. New products come with some little greetings card sized paper that congratulates you on spending money on their product.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday November 08 2017, @05:37AM
Two books? You must have bought a very early version of the product.
Turbo Pascal 6.0 came with four books, and Turbo Assembler&Tools with another four.
Some come with extensive manuals as PDF. But that's usually for hardware; software these days usually lacks proper documentation (and Open Source projects far too often think that Doxygen&Co. produce sufficient manuals).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.