4 ms·

Having the full set of the volumes on a shelf was quite the power play back in the day - and you needed a long and sturdy shelf. It's been discussed before on

Having the full set of the volumes on a shelf was quite the power play back in the day - and you needed a long and sturdy shelf. It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit could be so damned complicated as to require so much dead tree to cover it all, especially once things like VB6 got off the ground.

giantrobot 3y ago
> It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit could be so damned complicated as to require so much dead tree to cover it all, especially once things like VB6 got off the ground. It wasn't/isn't just a UI toolkit. The O'Reilly series covered all the parts of X, from the drawing primitives, to higher level Xlib, to managing X servers and clients. The equivalent on Windows would be a book series covering GDI, Win32, and configuring every Registry and Group Policy tweak in the Windows shell.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  > and configuring every Registry and Group Policy tweak in the Windows shell. Yeah and that in detail, not just the one line description you get which is often incomplete and sometimes outright misleading.
compsciphd 3y ago
I believe (dont remember fully, going back 30 years almost) that SCO or HP (or perhaps Sun?) shipped you the full set of these with a developer sdk license. So, where I worked, as we had multiple licenses and we really only needed to keep one or sets around, teenage me got to take a set home. With that said, my memory is that a large chunk of them was mostly the man pages printed out.
- jll29 3y ago
  The full set of HP-UX manuals and the full set of X11 manuals are right next to me on the shelf. I have fond memories playing the "man game" or the "reverse man game". In the former, player one calls out the name of a UNIX command, and player two needs to recite the one-line description. In the latter, player one reads out the description and player to needs to guess which command is thus described. While the UNIX manuals (section 3 (API) and especially section 1 (commands)) are well-used, I admittedly didn't use the X11 set as often: the most-used page of the X manual set is the one where it says how to set the DISPLAY variable.
spc476 3y ago
I have three volumes on my bookshelf. Volume 0 is a reference for the X protocol itself. Volume 1 covers programming with Xlib, and Volume 2 is the Xlib reference. The linked to book appears to be how to administrate an X server. And I know at least one volume covers a higher level toolkit other than Xlib (Athena widget set maybe?)
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  Four volumes cover Motif and XView, with a guide and reference volume for each. The Xt Intrinsics volume also uses Athena as the widget toolkit.
  - hulitu 3y ago
    It's the other way around. Athena and Motif use Xt. I don't know about XView.
    - badsectoracula 3y ago
      I think you misunderstood what i wrote. I didn't write that Xt itself is using Athena, i wrote that the "Xt Intrinsics volume" (i.e. the book) uses Athena as the widget toolkit. Xt itself does not provide any widgets so you need some widgets to show what it does and the book uses Athena for that.
badsectoracula 3y ago
> how any UI toolkit O'Reilly's X Window volumes are not about a toolkit, they document everything that could be relevant to someone about X Windows at the time, including the X protocol itself, the low level X library, a user's guide, the linked administrator's guide and two widget toolkits - Motif and XView - with both references and guides to them. > once things like VB6 got off the ground. VB6 also had a ton of documentation, to the point where it wasn't feasible to print it all. VB5 had a 1064 page reference book and a 898 page guide book, among others. Hell, even VB1 for DOS had a 510 page reference book and a 658 page guide book. And these things only discussed a fraction of what the X Windows books did.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I used to have shelves and shelves of books related to various Borland programming tools, DOS/PC technical references, etc. In the pre-web/broadband PC world you didn't really have the equivalent of man pages or a lot of online references generally.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  If I recall correctly, even the motif part required multiple books. We had the whole set in the college library and it took up a whole shelf. I often looked in awe at it, but it didn't seem to get much use.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    Yeah, volumes 6a and 6b, one being the manual, the other being the reference.
wkat4242 3y ago
It was a different time. Even a simple "office" style package for DOS came with multiple volumes of dead trees. Most of the stuff in there was the kind of stuff we don't document anymore these days because they're considered self-explanatory. Of course the waterfall model and lack of online updates made this more feasible. When updates were shipped once a year or so they often came with paper addendums you could clip into the binders. These days software changes too fast for such documentation to keep up, but I feel we've gone too far, it's often hard to find any clear word on what something does now.

giantrobot 3y ago

> It's been discussed before on HN but it was honestly always kind of baffling to me how any UI toolkit could be so damned complicated as to require so much dead tree to cover it all, especially once things like VB6 got off the ground. It wasn't/isn't just a UI toolkit. The O'Reilly series covered all the parts of X, from the drawing primitives, to higher level Xlib, to managing X servers and clients. The equivalent on Windows would be a book series covering GDI, Win32, and configuring every Registry and Group Policy tweak in the Windows shell.

wkat4242 3y ago
> and configuring every Registry and Group Policy tweak in the Windows shell. Yeah and that in detail, not just the one line description you get which is often incomplete and sometimes outright misleading.

compsciphd 3y ago

I believe (dont remember fully, going back 30 years almost) that SCO or HP (or perhaps Sun?) shipped you the full set of these with a developer sdk license. So, where I worked, as we had multiple licenses and we really only needed to keep one or sets around, teenage me got to take a set home. With that said, my memory is that a large chunk of them was mostly the man pages printed out.

jll29 3y ago
The full set of HP-UX manuals and the full set of X11 manuals are right next to me on the shelf. I have fond memories playing the "man game" or the "reverse man game". In the former, player one calls out the name of a UNIX command, and player two needs to recite the one-line description. In the latter, player one reads out the description and player to needs to guess which command is thus described. While the UNIX manuals (section 3 (API) and especially section 1 (commands)) are well-used, I admittedly didn't use the X11 set as often: the most-used page of the X manual set is the one where it says how to set the DISPLAY variable.

spc476 3y ago

I have three volumes on my bookshelf. Volume 0 is a reference for the X protocol itself. Volume 1 covers programming with Xlib, and Volume 2 is the Xlib reference. The linked to book appears to be how to administrate an X server. And I know at least one volume covers a higher level toolkit other than Xlib (Athena widget set maybe?)

badsectoracula 3y ago
Four volumes cover Motif and XView, with a guide and reference volume for each. The Xt Intrinsics volume also uses Athena as the widget toolkit.
- hulitu 3y ago
  It's the other way around. Athena and Motif use Xt. I don't know about XView.
  - badsectoracula 3y ago
    I think you misunderstood what i wrote. I didn't write that Xt itself is using Athena, i wrote that the "Xt Intrinsics volume" (i.e. the book) uses Athena as the widget toolkit. Xt itself does not provide any widgets so you need some widgets to show what it does and the book uses Athena for that.

badsectoracula 3y ago

> how any UI toolkit O'Reilly's X Window volumes are not about a toolkit, they document everything that could be relevant to someone about X Windows at the time, including the X protocol itself, the low level X library, a user's guide, the linked administrator's guide and two widget toolkits - Motif and XView - with both references and guides to them. > once things like VB6 got off the ground. VB6 also had a ton of documentation, to the point where it wasn't feasible to print it all. VB5 had a 1064 page reference book and a 898 page guide book, among others. Hell, even VB1 for DOS had a 510 page reference book and a 658 page guide book. And these things only discussed a fraction of what the X Windows books did.

ghaff 3y ago
I used to have shelves and shelves of books related to various Borland programming tools, DOS/PC technical references, etc. In the pre-web/broadband PC world you didn't really have the equivalent of man pages or a lot of online references generally.
wkat4242 3y ago
If I recall correctly, even the motif part required multiple books. We had the whole set in the college library and it took up a whole shelf. I often looked in awe at it, but it didn't seem to get much use.
- badsectoracula 3y ago
  Yeah, volumes 6a and 6b, one being the manual, the other being the reference.

wkat4242 3y ago

It was a different time. Even a simple "office" style package for DOS came with multiple volumes of dead trees. Most of the stuff in there was the kind of stuff we don't document anymore these days because they're considered self-explanatory. Of course the waterfall model and lack of online updates made this more feasible. When updates were shipped once a year or so they often came with paper addendums you could clip into the binders. These days software changes too fast for such documentation to keep up, but I feel we've gone too far, it's often hard to find any clear word on what something does now.