Why 3-hole-punch the manuals?

[graywest]

Apologies if this has been discussed before, but I couldn't find anything with a search.

 

Why did Atari start out 3-hole punching their 8-bit computer manuals? I mean, it seems obvious that they wanted people to store them in a 3-ring binder, but why? I'm just curious as to what the thinking was behind this. Was this common to computer manuals of the time?

 

They gave up on this after a few years, but most, if not all of the early manuals (DOS, BASIC, even games) are three-hole punched along one side, and they're sometimes not even bound - just a collection of loose pages.

[_The Doctor__]

Because when the world was new, taking certain sheets out as a reference was easier. Changing sections of the book or manual was also easier. Internally within the company and externally by users, as updates occurred, they would swap out changed sections. You could add your own notes/usage and findings. Super great way to do it. Sometimes you will find material punched and inserted by Atari or a user/developer when you find these today. Up until a few years ago major companies still did this sort of thing with Operations manuals. When the S.O.P. changes so does that part of the book. A book of books often came about with addendum and the like

Edited July 4, 2020 by _The Doctor__

[StickJock]

I don't know the answer to your question, but I have right in front of me a 3-ring binder full of Atari manuals!

 

[FifthPlayer]

I remember all the early IBM software releases for the then-shiny-new PC were in three-ring binders with punched-hole documentation.  I don't think this was just an Atari thing.

[snicklin]

Are the three holes a US standard? I know that typically in Europe and Australia that either two or occassionally 4 holes are more standard.

[StickJock]

On US standard 8.5" x 11" paper, it was usually either 3 holes on the left or two holes on the top.  The spacing of the 2-hole punch did not match the distance between any of the holes of the 3-hole punch.

 

A lot of the docs that I printed out have 4 holes, since I used a 2-hole punch three times to punch a single hole on top, a single hole on the bottom, and then when punching the center hole, I got the bonus, unused 4th hole.  

[+Stephen]

Traper Keepers!  Remember them during school?  3-ring was the standard for maybe 20 years.

[StickJock]

I had a couple of these in my high school Trapper Keeper.

 

Yes, those are 8" floppies.

[Preppie]

In the 80s in NE England I seached every stationary shop in a 10mile radius for a 3 ring binder and never found one.  Eventually I got one, my Mam bought one of those weekly magazine and the first issue came with a binder - when I noticed it was 3 ring I stole it from her, my De Re Atari and manuals are still in that binder with the knitting picture on the front lol

 

 

[+Nezgar]

3-ring binders stay open next to my keyboard for reference much easier than bound books... Don't you hate holding the book open with one hand, typing in a BASIC listing with the other, otherwise the book folds back up on you.

[Rybags]

3 rings are more durable than 2.

I've got a self made 2-ring folder with handwritten Atari + C64 docs, mainly from the time before I had physical copies of stuff like the OS/Hardware manual.

I've had to reinforce plenty of pages.

 

Those were the days!  You'd get software that actually worked (you weren't paying them to be an unwitting beta-tester), and you got proper documentation, not some scabby 12 page thing in 6 languages, or PDF that you had to print yourself.

[ClausB]

16 hours ago, StickJock said:

Yes, those are 8" floppies.

For what system?

Edited July 6, 2020 by ClausB

[StickJock]

4 hours ago, ClausB said:

For what system?

Wang 2200T.  

No microprocessor, 4K of RAM, a 64x16 display and we liked it just fine!

 

https://www.wang2200.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_2200

 

The 2-bay floppy drive is on the right.

 

[Rybags]

IBM mainframe manuals... I'm fairly sure it was 3 hole (not 4)

They were pretty well built.   We had binders that had a steel spine that ran the height of the folder, there's 3 straight bars that are about 4 inches long which you insert the pages onto then put the cover on and another spine with a retaining mechanism.

Heavy to carry and could be annoying when you wanted to just copy a few pages as dismantling took a while.  But made to last and some copped daily use until around the late 1990s when CD based manuals and downloadable RedBooks started to take over.

[StickJock]

I remember using a lot of these BitD.  These appear to be self-adhesive.  I remember them being loose in the box and you had to lick & stick them.

 

 

I also remember putting reinforcing rings on some of my early floppies, too.

 

[_The Doctor__]

31 minutes ago, StickJock said:

Wang 2200T.  

No microprocessor, 4K of RAM, a 64x16 display and we liked it just fine!

 

https://www.wang2200.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_2200

 

The 2-bay floppy drive is on the right.

 

Possibly heard some time in the past...

@StickJock was very busy playing with his Wang last night and he liked it just fine!

Edited July 6, 2020 by _The Doctor__

[jhd]

On 7/4/2020 at 4:19 PM, _The Doctor__ said:

Up until a few years ago major companies still did this sort of thing with Operations manuals. When the S.O.P. changes so does that part of the book. A book of books often came about with addendum and the like

 

Actually, this model is still very commonly used in legal publishing. As the law on a specific topic develops, individual chapters (or even pages) can be added/changed without reprinting the whole book. Incidentally, it also provides the publisher with ongoing revenue from a subscription. 

 

As for computer manuals, I too used a three-ring binder to gather together the smaller manuals, together with pages of my handwritten notes. It was very convenient having everything together in one physical volume on my desk. 

[StickJock]

8 minutes ago, _The Doctor__ said:

Possibly heard some time in the past...

@StickJock was very busy playing with his Wang last night and he liked it just fine!

Like I said, no microprocessor!  ?

[ivop]

IIRC the SunOS manuals where also three hole. If one hole got damaged, you still had two holes to keep it straight. With two hole punched manuals, once one of your holes was broken, the other one went quickly after that.

 

Edited July 6, 2020 by ivop

[Gavin1968]

My guess cost had something to do with it. Atari was very cost conscious back in the day, trying to keep costs down as low as they could. I remember making my parents get me a bunch of hole savers for them. 

[ClausB]

On 7/6/2020 at 11:37 AM, StickJock said:

Wang 2200T.  

No microprocessor, 4K of RAM, a 64x16 display and we liked it just fine!

 

https://www.wang2200.org/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_2200

 

The 2-bay floppy drive is on the right.

 

Been reading up on this machine. Pretty nice for its time. Custom 4-bit CPU runs at 0.6 Mips. Up to 32KB RAM can be read 8 bits wide but written only 4 bits at a time. 42KB program ROM is 20 bits wide and implements full BASIC and I/O. Keyword atoms (tokens) save RAM space. Variables are 8-byte BCD floating point with 13 digits precision, typical for a calculator company back then.

 

I would guess it's roughly comparable in performance to a TRS-80 Model 1 Level II. (Fun fact: the Z80 has only a 4-bit ALU inside.)

[Keatah]

 

On 7/6/2020 at 1:49 AM, Rybags said:

Those were the days!  You'd get software that actually worked (you weren't paying them to be an unwitting beta-tester), and you got proper documentation, not some scabby 12 page thing in 6 languages, or PDF that you had to print yourself.

 

The importance of Reference and Tutorial manuals for the early micros cannot be understated. In fact, having the original documentation should be a top-priority requirement to any user or collector.

 

Manuals helped define the personality of the platform. They set the scope and contained all sorts of goodies. They allowed you, the user, to set your own learning pace. And the early Apple/Atari manuals were inspiring. And whenever I had a question I could almost always find the answer in my stash of manuals. They were written in such a way that it seemed the author was right beside you; and even available to answer questions.

 

It was a time when manuals taught you not only how to use something but also explained in semi-technical layperson terms how something worked. This gave you a better understanding of how to do something rather than just going through a key-sequence or procedure. It helped you imagine a problem and intuitively come up with the steps to solve it.

 

You even learned about the subject. Say for an astronomy program.. You learned the key sequence to operate the eclipse prediction module, its limits, and how to use it. You also got a "theory of operation" of how eclipses worked and maybe even insight into the program too.

 

At the time I didn't fully appreciate the depth and scope of the manuals included. Manuals back then were substantive and had both low level technical material as well as layperson theory of operation sections and step-by-step tutorials. But many ideas presented to me back then apply to today's computer systems. And I use those ideas in day-to-day operations now.

 

It was a time when manuals was printed with pride and were key components to a "complete" system. Hardware. Software. Documentation.

 

This is the type of documentation that is sorely lacking with today's products. The software publishers may argue that one doesn't need to know the inner workings. I completely disagree. Once you understand how something works, and understand its full capabilities and purpose, THEN you have the knowledge to use something the way it was intended. And you know how fix something or when to seek a higher power for help.

 

Finally, the artwork was inspiring and relaxing. Again look at the Apple/Atari manuals from the II+ or 400/800 timeframe. The art on the Applesoft Tutorial book shows a blur, a montage, of about 10 different things going on. Something relaxing to look at and get lost in - a dreamworld. Was great to just sit there and stare and wonder and imagine; especially after a tedious day of grade school where you didn't learning anything useful anyways!

Edited July 7, 2020 by Keatah

[Keatah]

I'm not sure when the quality of documentation started going down. The best I can say is when someone decided to do "online" documentation. Links in the program to something online. That sort of thing sucks and I tend to avoid those programs, unless I can capture the entire contents and save it locally.

 

Docs were still good in the 80486 era, my rig came with 5-8kg of printed matter. And DOS things had good in-program local help. So did stuff in the Win95/98 timeframe. You either got .CHM or .PDF, or substantial printed material.

 

Perhaps things started downhill when developers discovered they could do things on the internet. The whole idea of online web documentation sucks. It's fine if you can download it for local use., but some developers use weird formats that even exclude that. Like having to use 5-clicks to read one faq or something. Too many drop-downs, too many hidden sections. All for the perceived want of minimalism and me-too web page design. Just give me a text file!

 

 

Edited July 7, 2020 by Keatah

[StickJock]

2 hours ago, ClausB said:

Been reading up on this machine. Pretty nice for its time. Custom 4-bit CPU runs at 0.6 Mips. Up to 32KB RAM can be read 8 bits wide but written only 4 bits at a time. 42KB program ROM is 20 bits wide and implements full BASIC and I/O. Keyword atoms (tokens) save RAM space. Variables are 8-byte BCD floating point with 13 digits precision, typical for a calculator company back then.

 

I would guess it's roughly comparable in performance to a TRS-80 Model 1 Level II. (Fun fact: the Z80 has only a 4-bit ALU inside.)

The keyboard keys had plastic cover shells that you could remove and put new key labels under them.  It also had a toggle switch that toggled the keyboard between lowercase/uppercase & uppercase/keyword.  If you typed PRINT then it took 5 bytes, but if you used the keyword then it was only one byte.  I used all sorts of tricks to save RAM, such as renumbering the program starting at 1 with an increment of 1, no space between program line & command, stringing multiple commands on a single line with :, all keywords, single letter variable names, etc.  It was like doing a 1-line constest!

If there was a PRINT AT or POS command, we didn't know about it, so we had to roll our own.  We started out with printing a 'home' character to put the cursor at the top-left, then used a for-next loop to print line feeds, followed by a for-next loop to print a move-cursor-right character.  I remember optimizing this to using a string containing a home character followed by 15 line feeds, and a string containing 63 "cursor right" character, and then instead of for-next loops, I would just print a subset of the string.  Much faster performance!

The display was a 64x16 green phosphorous CRT, and the characters were tall & skinny.  There was also a pixel or two between the lines for underlines.  There was no graphics mode, so all of the games we wrote used the built-in character set.  It did have some unusual symbols, like the little "hurricane" looking one.  It probably had some international symbols, too.  I think I used 3-4 letters to approximate the buggy for my version of Moon Patrol.  I used a single character for the player & robots in Robotron.  Robotron used several files, IIRC, in order to fit in RAM.  There was a loader, the game itself, a file full of the rooms, a high score saving program, and the high score data file.

The 2200T was the first computer that I ever used.  My older brother took me to the computer lab at the high school in the summer of 79 and taught me how to program on them in BASIC.  By the time that I got to high school, they had upgraded to a 2200VS system (minicomputer system, with a big CPU & hard drive (removable disk packs) in a small super air-conditioned room, and a dozen terminals in the lab) but they still had three of the old 2200T systems in the corner of the room, all sharing a 2-bay 8" floppy drive.  They didn't use the card reader anymore.  One was also hooked up to a 132-column daisy wheel printer.  That one also had 16K - the other two only had 8K (or was it 4K?).  Since all the classes did work on the newer systems, it was easy to get time on the old Ts, so that's where I spent most of my time.  There was also one or two Apple IIs.  Then they got a couple of dozen Atari 800s (each station had an 800, two 810s, printer & monitor - don't remember if the printer was an 825, which would have meant an 850 as well, or a 1025).  The computer classes targeted both the Wang 2200VS systems (programming in basic, cobol, fortran) and the Atari 800s (programming in basic, pascal), so the 2200Ts were nearly always available.

Coincidentally, I was watching Cloud Atlas last night (strange movie) and saw a Wang computer in a scene at a nuclear power plant in 1978.  Prop guys were on the ball!

 

I remember a guy a year ahead of me wrote a duplicate login screen for the 2200VS system.  He would log in, and run this program, and leave the machine.  Then, when someone would try to login, the program would save the login credentials, show a login error, and then logout.  Logging out would result in, you guessed it, a fresh login screen!  The only difference between the real & trojan screens was that he could not suppress the cursor (flashing underline) and the real login did not show the cursor.  I got in the habit of doing a fake login for my first try before entering my real credentials.  I think that he actually ended up helping out a teacher that forgot their password.  These days, he would probably get expelled at a minimum!

 

 

[ClausB]

Ah the good old days! We used similar tricks to save RAM on our high school's Altair 8800As. They had 16K but the MS cassette BASIC took 10K of that for itself.