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Comment by glimshe | Hacker News Reader

It's somewhat humorous that the most expensive part is the manual! And no wonder electronics nowadays stopped including comprehensive manuals like the Spectrum's in their aggressive cost cutting.

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Just publishing on the web wasn't an option at the time. But damn! I remember reading at the back of a C64 manual as a kid. Trying out the various "commands". I had no concept of "programming" or "basic". This was just how the machine worked and I was occasionally in the mood of figuring it out. That time will never come again, for me or anyone else.

I was barely beginning to read when I got the manual. And it wasn't in my primary tongue. Illustrations showing how to connect the pieces and what buttons to press

    [L][O][A][D] [RETURN]

Enabled me to start following the instructions without knowing any English. What a brilliant manual it was!

For small-run offset printing (as opposed to laser-printer-quality stuff you get from print-on-demand shops, including PoD reissues of old titles the big academic publishers sell under the guise of new copies), the books themselves are basically free compared to the plates. A bookshop owner who also worked in printing once told me it was in the order of $1M for the plates for a 300-page book, and then negligible costs for the actual books until you get past at least tens of thousands of copies. So printing one manual or a hundred of them is a very different proposition from a normal-sized run of like 50k of them.

Those must have been some expensive plates. We did a vanity run of a small book and it was 10k copies for about $20k around 2000 or so - and half that was the plates.

The Spectrum manual was good, with the usual programming guide and a breakdown of the memory map and system variables, but the Jupiter Ace manual also included example circuits so you could build your own peripherals...

Here’s a bit of my comment from the MyNOR / FORTH thread the other day [0] about the Jupiter Ace manual.

The manual was great for its time, a little dated now but still a decent read [2]. It was reprinted in 2018 and still available [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

[2] https://archive.org/details/vickers_steven_jupiter_ace_4000_...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Jupiter-ACE-Manual-Anniversary-Progra...

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36416325

Oh, and of course, Steven Vickers wrote both these manuals and the ZX81 BASIC manual.

Also wrote the (Jupiter and Sinclair implementations of the) languages too!

Making a second, third, or fourth set of manuals would have obtained substantial economies of scale whether in the 20th or 21st centuries.

There was a time where PDF didn’t exist, there were no tools to create, let alone view or print manuals. Even when these became widespread, a number of troglodytes would get bent out of shape if their new appliance didn’t come with a (preferably bound!) paper manual. Most of these folks have either passed on or begrudgingly assimilated.

I'm kind of in that camp with cars. The last car I bought didn't come with an owner's manual. I've "begrudgingly" accepted that a PDF copy on my phone is for most practical purposes just as good, but I still prefer the paper. It's just easier to read, thumb through, or check the index and find what I'm looking for than doing the same on a small touch screen.

Agreed. I buy real factory service manuals for any car I plan to keep for any length of time. They go for about $100 on eBay and are worth every penny.

The cost for the manuals seems high--at least if you're willing to have some flexibility on paper choice. I'd think that one volume print on demand from Amazon would be more like $10 although it's admittedly been a while since I looked at pricing.

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