That software box on the shelf at Babbage’s is a cherished memory—a tangible oddity of software distribution prior to broadband, now just a relic in memory. Most of us assumed it would last forever. We get our software at the click of a button now, but we traded something for that.

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xnorswap 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Software felt more valuable when you forked over £60+ ( Which was worth a lot more back then ) and got a physical box, with a chunky set of instruction manuals and 5+ floppy disks.

It wasn't even broadband that destroyed that experience, when CDs came around developers realised they had space to just stick a PDF version of the manual on the CD itself and put in a slip that tells you to stick in the CD, run autorun.exe if it didn't already, and refer to the manual on the CD for the rest!

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moregrist 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There are many things I feel nostalgic for in that era, but chunky manuals for specific software are at the bottom of that list.

They weren’t like textbooks, which have knowledge that tends to be relevant for decades. You’d get a new set with every software release, making the last 5-20 lbs of manuals obsolete.

You did lose some of the readability of an actual book. Hard-copy manuals were better for that. But for most software manuals, I did more “look up how to do this thing” than reading straight through. And with a pdf on a CD you had much better search capabilities. Before that you’d have to rely on the ToC, the book index and your own notes. For many manuals, the index wasn’t great. Full text search was a definite step up.

Even the good ones, like the 1980s IBM 2-ring binder manuals, which had good indexes, were a pain to deal with and couldn’t functionally match a PDF or text file on a CD for searchability.

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flyinghamster 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Also, you were far more likely to get actual documentation back in the day. You're never going to get a detailed first-party technical reference for today's Apple computers (at least not without being Big Enough and signing a mountain of NDAs); compare that to the Apple II having a full listing of the Monitor ROM, or the original IBM PC Technical Reference Manual.

	▲	bombcar 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The very existence of those manuals improved the software, as the technical writers were trained in a different discipline than programming, and it really showed. Even some well-documented modern software is obviously documented by the programmers and programmer-adjacent.

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ofrzeta 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Manuals like AutoCADs have certainly felt valuable https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/Gm8AAeSwwIZowjzn/s-l1600.jpg It's not even complete, for instance the ADS manual is missing. It's also a bit more expensive with roughly 3700 USD in 1992.

	▲	xnorswap 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Oh yeah, when I said £60, I was thinking of even the cheapest consumer-grade software!

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4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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