"Life it too short to read the manual"

[David Hayden]

A few random comments.

My 17-year-old step-son practically refuses to read a manual on anything. His standard response is "I'll just look it up on youtube." I'm convinced that he's afraid of manuals.

When I got my 41C at about his age, I clearly remember sitting down and reading the manual cover to cover. It took about 12 hours.

Manuals are harder because devices are more complex. I remember the manuals for the PDP/11 taking about 12 feet of shelf space. They were wonderful, but they were big. Now consider how much more complicated a cellphone is than a PDP/11. Thorough documentation would fill a room.

At the same time, the manuals that we do get have become less and less useful. Appliance and automobile manuals have 2 pages of warnings for every paragraph of information. Ironically enough, I think the warnings make the devices more dangerous rather than less because it's impossible to find the actual instructions. For a good example, see the manual for any chainsaw.

I went from a 41C to a 50g, so I was like a high school kid who knew nothing about a graphic calculator. Sadly, I found the printed User's Manual utterly impenetrable. IN retrospect, I realize that it's more like the quick reference guides of old.

The larger User's Guide was more helpful, but the information per page is very low. This is mostly due to the fact that for every concept, it tends to spend pages saying "in ALG mode, do this. Now if RPN mode, do it like this. If you're using soft menus, it looks like this, but if you're using choose boxes, it's like this."

Overall, I found the 48G manuals the most helpful for learning how to use a 50g.

The on-board help in the Prime is a huge step forward, as are the menus.