3 ms·

Not to mention great "online" (i.e. integrated into the IDE) help with useful examples and simple explanations.

by ido 7y ago

cblum 7y ago
I spent many hours of my childhood in that help system :)
- malux85 7y ago
  me too! <3
craz8 7y ago
Microsoft help systems were great back then. Which was good, as there was little online documentation, and what was available was expensive to access with per-minute dial-up fees I remember a version of MS C in the late 80s coming with 5,500 pages of printed documentation! And it was easy to find what you needed
- ido 7y ago
  i agree. imagine my disappointment upon installing Redhat Linux 5.2 in 1998 (from a CD-ROM that came bundled with a magazine!) and naively trying the man pages for documentation.
- badsectoracula 7y ago
  And Borland's help systems too. Sadly today with (internet) online documentation things are still not as good - even if often there is more information, it is scattered all over the place, often repeating (parts of) itself and slow to find and access. The main reason why i prefer to have a WIN32.HLP file from (i think) some Borland product whenever i need some Win32 function than search Google for it for MS Docs (the test is 99.9% of the cases the same anyway). Also why i have Zeal[0] installed with the docs of a few things i use and i download offline copies of whatever specs and documentation i can find for other things. But in terms of help systems, i think CHM was the peak (in terms of functionality - the HTML-based content is a bit of unnecessary overhead and something like HLP's hypertext should have been good enough, but Microsoft wanted to shove IE4 everywhere so they can claim it was an integral part of Windows 98 back then). [0] https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/
knome 7y ago
It really was fantastic. I taught myself QBasic out of the help screen when I was a teen. I spent many afternoons flicking through the extensive documentation and finding functions with interesting sounding names to read about and try as I programmed little games for myself.

Not to mention great "online" (i.e. integrated into the IDE) help with useful examples and simple explanations.

by ido 7y ago

Not to mention great "online" (i.e. integrated into the IDE) help with useful examples and simple explanations.

cblum 7y ago

I spent many hours of my childhood in that help system :)

malux85 7y ago
me too! <3

craz8 7y ago

Microsoft help systems were great back then. Which was good, as there was little online documentation, and what was available was expensive to access with per-minute dial-up fees I remember a version of MS C in the late 80s coming with 5,500 pages of printed documentation! And it was easy to find what you needed

ido 7y ago
i agree. imagine my disappointment upon installing Redhat Linux 5.2 in 1998 (from a CD-ROM that came bundled with a magazine!) and naively trying the man pages for documentation.
badsectoracula 7y ago
And Borland's help systems too. Sadly today with (internet) online documentation things are still not as good - even if often there is more information, it is scattered all over the place, often repeating (parts of) itself and slow to find and access. The main reason why i prefer to have a WIN32.HLP file from (i think) some Borland product whenever i need some Win32 function than search Google for it for MS Docs (the test is 99.9% of the cases the same anyway). Also why i have Zeal[0] installed with the docs of a few things i use and i download offline copies of whatever specs and documentation i can find for other things. But in terms of help systems, i think CHM was the peak (in terms of functionality - the HTML-based content is a bit of unnecessary overhead and something like HLP's hypertext should have been good enough, but Microsoft wanted to shove IE4 everywhere so they can claim it was an integral part of Windows 98 back then). [0] https://zealdocs.org/ https://zealdocs.org/

knome 7y ago

It really was fantastic. I taught myself QBasic out of the help screen when I was a teen. I spent many afternoons flicking through the extensive documentation and finding functions with interesting sounding names to read about and try as I programmed little games for myself.