Printing mistake in the 800XL manual

[Ross PK]

Back in around 1985 when I first got an Atari 800XL, I was typing in programs from the manual that came with the computer.

 

They wouldn't work though, turns out that PLOT was printed as PILOT in the manual, I remember my nephew at the time pointing it out to me when I was trying to get a program to work which created thunder and lightening on the screen.

 

I wonder if all the manuals had this mistake in them, or if it was something that was really rare?

 

Anyone noticed PLOT being printed as PILOT in their 800XL manuals?

[oracle_jedi]

I seem to remember Atari UK including an Errata in the package that pointed that out?

 

Errors in manuals I think were suprisingly rare given that most were developed with very basic word processing or no word processing tools at all.

 

Also many manuals were developed before the hardware was finished and so had erroneous or incomplete instructions, and others were extremely light on details. The Camputers Lynx manual had cute hand-drawn images including the ASCII table. The Sinclair ZX80 manual suggested using an unused channel button on your TV such as ITV2.

 

What did happen a lot was problems with magazine type-in programs. In some cases editors, familiar with type settings and magazine publishing, but clueless about computers, would deliberately omit parts of the listings to make the page format work. They had no idea such omissions would render the program unusable.

[jvas]

In my manual it has many versions of PLOT: PILOT, PILOTA, etc. I don't remember whether it was in English or Hungarian, but AFAIK it was translated and I thought back then, that it got corrupted during the translation only ...

[thorfdbg]

I wonder if all the manuals had this mistake in them, or if it was something that was really rare?

Not at all. My 800XL came with a German "manual" that wasn't even worth the paper it was printed on - not only typos, but sentences that did not even make any sense, or were plainly wrong. For example, the key combination Shift+TAB was described as "setet ein TAB gest" which is not even German ("setzt einen Tabulator-Stopp" - "sets a TAB Stop" would have been right.) Or the GRAPHICS command was described as "takes a parameter whose value is eight for plot". WTF? "Default Colors may appear if you do not define the color". May? Why may? They *do* appear unless you use SETCOLOR. And they actually used "Default" as a German word, apparently the translator didn't know what this was supposed to mean.

 

Basically, computing in the old age required you to find out yourself how it was supposed to work, or buy secondary literature.