Back when people bought software on physical media [pre-1999, basically], all decent software came with physical documentation. Games might come with a center-stapled 32 page manual; Turbo Pascal for Windows came with a multi-book reference set. For more than a decade, IBM PCs and their successors came with gray cloth-covered three-ring binders full of manuals and references.
When I bought Logic 7 around 2006, it came with several manuals and reference books totalling IIRC about 2000 pages. Now there's no boxed version to buy.
I still recall getting a flight simulator i had ordered right before we went on a family holiday, and i brought the documentation with me.
Not only was the actual manual of the game thick and detailed, but the company had also produced a document of the history of the plane and how it was operated during its years in service. This complete with diagrams, pictures, and perhaps even anecdotes from surviving aircrews.
All this for a game that modeled the world in flat shaded triangles on an A500.
Nowadays, people are editing photos, videos, recording podcasts, publishing their own books, all using tools that allow for more complexity than what any professional could do a couple decades ago, all without even having to read a single piece of documentation!
Not true at all. To do the things you mentioned, they all have to "read" plenty of "documentation", usually in form of third-party text/video tutorials, or even training courses. In a way, these are all worse than what the official manuals used to be.
What changed, unfortunately, is that the industry no longer seems to expect people to actually learn anything. In other professions, or even with things like driving, you're expected to learn and train before you can use a tool effectively. In computing, we somehow started to believe it's wrong, and thus we're making ever dumber and feature-less tools instead of telling people to suck it up and spend 30 minutes reading the included manual...
> they all have to "read" plenty of "documentation", usually in form of third-party text/video tutorials, or even training courses.
That's an optional step, of course. But it is far from required. I remember for instance my brother downloading a copy of Audacity and instantly starting to record his voice and putting together radio shows.
Of course, at some point, when he wanted to do complex stuff, he watched YouTube videos etc. But at this point he had already created many hours of content.
And I don't think watching a 10 minute YouTube video of someone showing how to perform X is worse than reading a user manual. People learn by watching much better than they do by reading a manual - especially since documentation is rarely the first concern of most companies, and is therefore often lacking in thoroughness, poorly written/translated, contains very few pictures/diagrams if any, etc.
> Of course, at some point, when he wanted to do complex stuff, he watched YouTube videos etc. But at this point he had already created many hours of content.
He presumably had previous experience with operating other GUI programs, and experience with standard computer concepts like programs and files. The big benefit here is that a lot of GUI paradigms are shared between very different kinds of programs, so something that would've been explained in text in a bound manual in the past gets covered very early on, either through experimentation, or someone explaining it.
> People learn by watching much better than they do by reading a manual
Depends. Is it something highly visual? Or is there an intuitive visualization of a concept that I need a high-level understand of? Then sure, a video illustration is invaluable.
Video was wonderful for learning to disassemble the trunk of my car to install a backup camera, replace my garbage disposal, and (back in the day) get an intuitive grasp of how sorting operations work.
I hate videos for programming tutorials. They're slow, awkward, difficult to jump around easily, use a boatload of bandwidth, and are a hassle to save for later.
> He presumably had previous experience with operating other GUI programs, and experience with standard computer concepts like programs and files. The big benefit here is that a lot of GUI paradigms are shared between very different kinds of programs, so something that would've been explained in text in a bound manual in the past gets covered very early on, either through experimentation, or someone explaining it.
Exactly! Just like reading documentation takes a bunch of knowledge as granted that most (but not all!) of the population possesses (reading, understanding diagrams, graphs, step by step assembly directions, etc.) You've put your finger on the wonderful thing that computer interaction has given us over the past decade or two - a shared visual/interactive language that, while far from perfect, lets the average teenager pick up Audacity and be productive with it within seconds.
> People learn by watching much better than they do by reading a manual
Except so many video tutorials aren't "to achieve x, do y and z", 90% of the running time is bloat. And that's not even counting the apparently mandatory intros and outros which talk about what is about to happen, or what just happened. I learn very little on YouTube because I'm must constantly distracted by how people misuse language. There's a whole lot of "content", sure, but precious little contained in it in relation to the bloat and the repetition.
> especially since documentation is rarely the first concern of most companies
That good documentation is less of a focus for "most" (do they have a clue or anything else to offer, or do they just come in large numbers?) companies is hardly an argument that worse documentation is actually better documentation.
I wonder how many times i have sworn at someone slapping up a 30 minute video of their mug talking when the same information could have been delivered in a few lines of text. All because they want those tiny tiny Youtube ad impressions.
This is why well received books rarely translate well into movies btw (at least if you try for one book, one movie).
It was a different era.