Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by titzer | Hacker News Reader

> removed the 2.5” HDD from the SPARCbook, added it to the USB enclosure, popped it into my Sun Blade 1500 and mounted the slice layout on the hard disk. Even if I didn’t already know Solaris, the SPARCbook manual that I downloaded detailed everything possible about the hardware and the Solaris operating system, including the default slice layout

This is why manuals are so damn important! Communicating to people 20+, maybe 50+ years in the future, what you've done, how the thing works, so it can be fixed and put back into service. All of today's undocumented soon-to-be-black-bricks--cough, I mean, electronic devices--are maddening. If you are lucky, there is a manual somewhere online, and even then, probably not the level that details hardware for fixing and replacing. Heck, you're lucky to find anything that even documents all the software functions available![1] (Recent Xfinity TV thingy, I'm looking at you). The attention to detail in older manuals was incredible. Most things these days are throwaway pieces of junk, not expensive, serviceable items that have durable documentation.

[1] I mean, why would you document the software of a device that is going to upgrade its software transparently as the manufacturer races to finish the features it should have shipped with, or alter the UI to inject ads into it later when their revenue model doesn't work out? Besides, you expect consumers to just give up on it and buy the next thing in 3-5 years.

I once went into a music store and they sold an old studio tape recorder - I say old but it looked new, everything aluminium and all. The thing about that one is that it came with a manual that included all the schematics for the electrical components, so that you can repair, replace or rebuild the electronics if needs be. They weren't so worried about others copying them at the time, I guess - I mean it was a specialist product for a niche market, and just because you have the plans doesn't mean you can reproduce it in a cost effective manner.

Here in Brazil, in the 80's, (probably still happens today) you could buy suitcases filled with many pages of reverse engineered schematics of popular TV and radio sets.

If you had any problem with your TV, would could take it to a workshop, the technician could diagnose it, query the schematic of that specific model and replace any defective part.

You could in the us too. However that soon stopped as solid state became reliable enough to rarely need repair.

Aside from the pesky capacitors, but then you don't need a schematic to find the part surrounded by burned PCB.

It's is a great shame how many LCD's have been landfilled for want of a part that costs nickel.

There's so much of this. Think of how many perfectly good battery cells from powerbanks end up in landfills because of cheap micro USB connectors that snap off the PCB.

> doesn't mean you can reproduce it in a cost effective manner.

But you could fix it if, e.g. a capacitor blew. And capacitors do have a tendency to blow. Thankfully recapping something typically doesn't require a manual, since they are labelled, but you get the point. Repair is important.

Not just professional equipment, pre-90s every electric/electronic hardware itself larger than a book had at least a high level block diagram on a sticker on the back or on an inside wall, and also more detailed diagrams on manuals. Complexities then went overboard and those diagrams became rarer.

I remember those diagrams also didn't include mechanical drawings, so the last part of your comment is right too. You aren't going to be making magnetic read/write heads or even DC motors from information taken from those diagrams, merely the topology of control circuits - which is an opposite view from how we'd see it today.

My TEAC A-X55 Mark II sound amplifier manual comes not only with the full block schematic, exploded view but with the full BOM and even all the PCB printouts... you can basically build the thing from scratch: https://imgur.com/a/hZeWFUF

It's "expensive" today to do such things. Greed is big and any cent counts.

That SPARCbook price was $21,000. Site doesn't say if that's inflation-adjusted for today's dollars, and internet being what it is today the top search links and Wikipedia reference links go back to this site as the source.

Still, you're advocating paying $20-40,000 for a laptop with the dual justification that "not expensive" is bad, and that 20+ years in the future someone can give a presentation on it to a usergroup interested in novelty value. That does not seem like a value for money proposition.

Back when engineering software ran on Unix, exclusively, you had no choice but to use one of these. I remember the Mentor sales guy having one to demo the latest IC design software.

Can't find an original ad but looks like similar SPARCbooks were $7,500 in their day. You can still spec out apples and thinkpads to this price, so I think the critique is legitimate.

That was 20 years ago or more so the MacBook is much cheaper even if it is maxed out

> Introduced in August 1995, the PowerBook 5300 series were the first PowerPC PowerBooks, ... The 100 MHz 5300c, with active matrix color, sold for $3,900 for the 8/500 configurration, and $4,700 for 16/750.[1]

> Announced in March 1998, ... The PowerBook G3 Series started at $2,299 for 233 MHz with no floppy drive and a 12" screen, and cost around $7,000 fully loaded.[2]

> If 2007 had a title, it might well be "Year of the Laptop." The US notebook market boomed in 2007, with laptop shipments rising 21 percent to a total of 31.6 million units. Desktops still outsold laptops in 2007, but the gap between the two has shrunk as desktop sales continue to decline.[3]

Laptop PCs started from $6000 range down to $2000 range over decades up to 2005 or so, not up from zero to there, at which point it established its position as the default form factor of personal computers. So if you go back in time they only gets expensive despite inflation.

1: https://apple-history.com/5300c

2: https://apple-history.com/pg3s

3: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2008/01/2008-could-be-the-ye...

Sorry I wasn’t specific. Lets say the price of a laptop is constant from 1995 to 2021 then with inflation it becomes cheaper forward in time.

It also gains more features sometimes.

It's usually easiest to mine tech magazine articles from Google Books. Looks like a 128MB 3TX was $21,450 in 1997 bucks ($36,660 today).

https://books.google.com/books?id=JDoEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=i...

I think you've actually undermined yourself.

> This is why manuals are so damn important! Communicating to people 20+, maybe 50+ years in the future,

Nobody making a commercial product at consumer (or general business-friendly) pricing today, cares about 50+ or even 20+ years into the future. You damn well better be selling something new to that customer, not supporting them 20 years in the future for your otherwise obsolete product.

I would say that if this is the justification, then documentation be damned.

This goes for super expensive digital items too, and it's really sad - High end Phase One gear, and basically every other manufacturer in this market, has so much hacking potential. It's all just serial interfaces, so far, but you have to reverse engineer it all :/

>This is why manuals are so damn important!

Apple's meteoric success would beg to differ.

What you said can be found in areas like industrial, aerospace and the like, as the manuals are part of the product delivery contract, but is not valued in consumer electronics anymore.

Apple doesn’t include physical manuals but their built-in Help and online support docs tend to be pretty detailed.

Not really. Apple's success merely shows that their methods are good for making them lots of money. There are many ways to judge the quality of a product. I'd argue that how much profit it makes is a bad one for literally everyone except the seller.

> I'd argue that how much profit it makes is a bad one for literally everyone except the seller.

This cannot be emphasized strongly enough -agreed!

Just because it is not valued currently does not mean it is not important.

I remember the manuals that came with the Apple II series. They actually had schematics of the machine. How times have changed...

The Apple II manuals were Great Literature, not merely Excellent Documentation.

The listings of Woz's riveting 6502 code and his brilliant schematics were the Jane Eyre of its genre.

Or maybe it's more appropriate to compare the fold-out Apple II schematics to the original Marilyn Monroe centerfold of Playboy's first issue in December 1953.

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