List charter mods & headcount... ;-)

From: Tony Duell <ard_at_p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat Jun 19 22:06:55 2004

> 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 :-)

Who said anything about garage mechanics understanding cars??? Round here
that's the last sort of person I'd let loose on any vehicle I expected to
travel in!

>
> > 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

Yes, lots od bells and whistles that aren't really essential :-(.

> > 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

I am darn sure it hasn't, but anyway...

> 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
Received on Sat Jun 19 2004 - 22:06:55 BST