19 Jun
2004
19 Jun
'04
3:06 p.m.
In the "old" days, DEC used to produce
technical
manuals for pretty much everything and the manual
The fact that people will actually buy something without a technical
manual somewhat suprises me, but anyway....
were available if you paid for them. These days
the number of customers who would order such manuals
is much smaller so producing them is rarely cost-effective.
(They are pretty expensive to produce properly).
Problem is that the information now is often not available in _any_ form
A few notes of the program-accessible registers, pinouts, etc would be a
great help -- I don't need all the words that go between them. I've
produced repair information for older stuff (not all in one LSI ASIC) and
it generally consists of connector diagrams, schematics, and not much
more. The DEC (and HP, and...) technical manuals were great, but probably
about 10 times as thick as they needed to be.
This may partially explain the lethal driving I
see around here :-(...
I'm not sure that car mechanics have any better a track
record than the average motorist :-) It propably won't suprise you that although I
don't drive, I have no
problem repairing cars (old or modern). They're not that complicated.
Heck, I'll have a go at repairing _anything_...
I think modern cars might be a bit more complicated
than those from say twenty years ago, but only because
they have more in them to go wrong. Getting hold of It's the
absolute, not relative number that bothers me. What
I mean is
that <n> years ago (for large n) there were A clueful users and B
clueless ones (with B being fairly small). Now there are C
clueful users
and D cluelss ones. I think everyone agrees that D is larger
than B (the
number of non-knowledgeable users has certainly gone up). But
IMHO C is
less than A -- the number of clueful users has actually gone down in
absolute terms.
I suspect that C has actually gone up (or your standards for
the entry bar into C have). There are many more people around now (that I know) who can fix their PC or fix their
radio
or fix their car. (Maybe the number for "fix the car" is
Take one look at the sort of 'technical' magazines you get in, say, W. H.
Smith and compare them with the ones available 10 or 20 years ago. The
number of such publications has gone down, the complexity has also gone
down. The number of shops selling tools, components, metalwork stuff, car
parts, etc has also gone down. If more people were doing this sort of
thing then surely there's be a market for the materials to do it.
-tony