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We have entered a time where the first generation of people who grew-up with the internet part of their entire lives are now in charge. What to older generation

We have entered a time where the first generation of people who grew-up with the internet part of their entire lives are now in charge. What to older generations is terrible UX and bad or completely lacking documentation to them is just normal. IBM used to have great documentation for their systems, which they happily charged their customers money for hard copies. There really was not digital documentation. Microsoft has recently turned around the direction of their digital documentation (in a good way), which has been a huge organizational effort. Every generation knows something preceding and succeeding generations do not.

dredmorbius 7y ago
IBM charged, yes, but UNIX shipped with online manpages (printed out in full as a bindered reference in the terminal labs at my uni), which documented not only userland commands, but system calls, library functions, device drivers, games!, file formats, and other information. Access to Unix, a remote (shared) compute resource (sit down at any terminal and log in), "write" and "talk" (after the first three-digit phone bill on a long-distance relationship), FTP sites, Usenet, and the online computerised library catalogue (backed by a paper resource rather than webpages) was a 10-20 year future timewarp for me in the mid-1980s. Little of this was accessible to anyone outside a limited (though at the time fairly substantial) number of universities and a handful of tech companies and government offices, nor would it be for another decade or more for the most part. In terms of online access to published information, it's only been the emergence of Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, in the past 5 years or so, that's matched the earlier access I'd had. Access, I'll note, which I didn't make up for by paying academic-publishing highway-robbery rates, but simply went without (or satisficed with very occasional author-dropped copies on academic homepages). Quality of documentation has of course varied. But the tradition of freely-available online information does date to the 1970s, and was very well established by the 1980s.

dredmorbius 7y ago

IBM charged, yes, but UNIX shipped with online manpages (printed out in full as a bindered reference in the terminal labs at my uni), which documented not only userland commands, but system calls, library functions, device drivers, games!, file formats, and other information. Access to Unix, a remote (shared) compute resource (sit down at any terminal and log in), "write" and "talk" (after the first three-digit phone bill on a long-distance relationship), FTP sites, Usenet, and the online computerised library catalogue (backed by a paper resource rather than webpages) was a 10-20 year future timewarp for me in the mid-1980s. Little of this was accessible to anyone outside a limited (though at the time fairly substantial) number of universities and a handful of tech companies and government offices, nor would it be for another decade or more for the most part. In terms of online access to published information, it's only been the emergence of Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, in the past 5 years or so, that's matched the earlier access I'd had. Access, I'll note, which I didn't make up for by paying academic-publishing highway-robbery rates, but simply went without (or satisficed with very occasional author-dropped copies on academic homepages). Quality of documentation has of course varied. But the tradition of freely-available online information does date to the 1970s, and was very well established by the 1980s.