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Comment by hn8305823 | Hacker News Reader

I get a weird feeling reading these technical manuals from the 1940's. It feels like we used to know how to do things correctly, and can describe them with precise language, but somehow we lost those abilities?

I know that doesn't make much sense but that is exactly the feeling I get reading these.

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This type of writing takes a lot of effort. In computing, the pace of change is high, so in many cases, by the time you've published the manual, the product has changed. In the old days, software would come with large manuals, and then a brief pamphlet of things that changed between when the manual was finalized and when the software was finalized, and then usually a one sheet with installation instructions.

Of course, "noone" read the manuals, in part because they were out of date, in part because hopefully the software was easy enough to use that the manual wasn't required, in part because reading the manual is boring. Since they're a lot of effort to write, and nobody reads them, they stopped getting made.

Well said. This type of writing is perfectly doable but it does take effort and a lot of experience.

Well, things were simpler back then, but for the ww2 manuals in particular, I wonder if it wasn't also that the manuals were written for rapid comprehension because it was quite likely that the reader was someone who just took things over in the field after the expert had been killed.

You could make the argument that things were more complicated back then. They had a real need for well written comprehensive manuals. Nowadays I guess we don't because they don't appear to be made much any more.

See also schematics. I watch a lot, perhaps too much, of people repairing old electronic equipment. And they always seem able to whip out a set of schmatics to help them diagnose the problem. In some areas things get worse over time.

I get a similar feeling looking at instructional videos from that era[0][1], or reading books like Stick and Rudder[2][3], or even the simple brilliance of the visual design of the London Underground[4]. There's a pervasive sense that despite the reams of progress that has been made in the science of human factors, simple straightforwardness is becoming an endangered species.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOLtS4VUcvQ [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stick_and_Rudder [3] https://i.stack.imgur.com/7YAxo.jpg [4] https://i.redd.it/iav0ejncor7a1.jpg

This isn't really a technical manual, though, like the one that may come with a dishwasher or something.

This is more like a training manual meant to help a person with no prior knowledge become proficient in some topic. You should compare it to a textbook or online classes.

Thing is, it still compares very favourably. Hell, going to school in 90s and 2000s, I remember old textbooks and exercise books books from 1950s-1970s, that my grandfather would occasionally give me. Those old English books (for English as second language - geographical context: Poland), in particular, were miles ahead of the stuff we had to buy for classes.

My working theory is this: those old books of my grandpa that I liked so much were, just like the manuals GP mentioned, written with reader's self-education in mind. They're supposed to teach you things as you read them and work through the exercises. In contrast, textbooks of my time seem to be written for supervised learning - the student gets content-light, fluff-heavy books that cannot be used in isolation, as crucial information is restricted only to teacher's companion books.

My cynical addendum is this: the latter is a great way for ensuring recurring revenue: the student book is not a complete solution, forcing dependence on teachers; schools are easier to convince that the last year's edition is obsolete and needs to be replaced with this year's edition, and then teachers will pressure students to buy new books, to avoid the hassle of supporting multiple editions of textbooks that are all incompatible with the most recent teacher's companion book. The market wasn't this diabolically wasteful a few decades ago.

The quality and precision of technical documentation indeed has gone down a lot. This is not merely because (some) things have become more complex, and because people tend to jump between a growing multitude of things, but also because people just don’t take the time anymore to do it right, and increasingly don’t even experience good technical documentation, and thus don’t know what it would look like.

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