IBM 3740 Data Entry System [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

IBM 3740 Data Entry System [pdf]

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40 pointsjhallenworld11 comments

What a brilliant manual! Good photos, clear illustrations, screenshots, dimensions, tables - everything. You can read this 50 years later and feel like you understand. IBM had very good technical documentation guidelines and processes.

It wasn't just IBM. Everything those days came with amazing documentation. I got a pretty average "office" suite with my first PC called "ability plus" and it came with a thick binder of documentation that explained everything including the most complex features in detail.

It was even a ring binder so when updates came out you got a pack of updated pages you could insert at the right places. When I bought a scenery kit for fight simulator it came with a binder full of maps.

More in line with this equipment in the article, DEC's terminals came with similar quality documentation including that explaining every control code. No complexity or feature was hidden. Same with my dot matrix printer. Things an average user would never mess with, but I wrote a few programs to play with the double-height fonts and custom character sets. My first color TV came with full electrical schematics and instructions on how to open it, something that could be lethal to an average user and they'd never attempt it. But the manuals were there to perpetuate this information and in case you needed to use a third party repairman.

I miss that, though we can do without the kilos of dead trees with every product. These days we have pdf for that. But the transparency was amazing. These days there's way too much secret sauce and lock-in / walled gardens.

Also up into the 90s we didn't need a right to repair movement because we still had that right and access to spare parts. When the plastic pocket clip on my Sony walkman broke off I went to Sony's headquarters near Schiphol Airport and simply got a new one. I got a button PCB assembly for my stereo at the same time because some buttons were failing. Phillips had the same service. Leading to much less e-waste.

Not everything has become better these days. It's not just old man shaking a stick. Design for obsolescence is really a thing now.

Using 8 inch floppies instead of punched cards, but otherwise the same workflow. Also check out the 3742 dual data station: two operators share a CRT- mirrors show half the screen to each operator.

One of the systems where the data could be delivered to was the System/32, which featured a compatible disk drive. The System/32 doesn't only share the design language but also the mirrored desk screen (showing just a rather small portion of the actual CRT).

CelGenStudios recently published a nice video on this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4lJpmLm6dc

My only complaint is that they used a generic font for the screen diagrams when they could have used something closer.

The font used in those displays is beautiful - modern and simple, very readable.

You might like this... https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font

+ comments here... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24646107

Of course I would. I made it.

What's the proper meme for this sort of situation?

Serendipity

I’m going to go with:

I see what I did there.

Thank you both. I LOL'ed hard here.

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