16 Apr
2020
16 Apr
'20
11:53 p.m.
On Apr 16, 2020, at 23:37, J. David Bryan wrote:
On Thursday, April 16, 2020 at 23:18, Frank McConnell
wrote:
The folks who did the 3000 manuals didn?t do that very often. What we
got were almost always update packets that simply replaced pages in their
manuals. Once I think I remember getting a sticker to be stuck over the
replaced text on a page.
Sometimes I have come across shrink-wrapped
manuals and later updates,
and scanned them as found. I wouldn?t want to deny other people the
opportunity to apply updates to manuals, you know?
Oh yes, especially the ones that would say, "Insert the six paragraphs
below between the third and fourth lines of page 23." :-) I used to despise HP when they would send updates that
consisted of
instructions to modify existing manual pages instead of sending replacement
pages. I recall one update, maybe for the HP 64000 logic station mainframe
service manual, that instructed me to change a dozen or so schematics --
simple things, like "replace feedback resistor R23 with the active filter
circuit shown below." That one got stuck in the front of the outdated
manual, as I just couldn't bring myself to butcher the pages as they
required....
When it came to manual updates, the Logic Systems Division was aptly named.
The 3000 folks I think had to make some effort to get beyond paste-up
to where they were doing their manuals and updates in something, and it didn?t
happen until the not-so-early 1980s. Sometimes I thought the thing was
TDP/3000 and the camera-ready copy came out of a 2680A or 2688A printer. I
don?t really know how they got there or how it worked, and by the end of the
1980s I think they had moved away from TDP/3000 to something else.
-Frank McConnell