Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "We used to write good documentation... (w/The Taylor and Amy Show)" video.

@TassieLorenzo To be fair, I was 11 year old the year that all the media outlets were obsessing over the 11-year old computer geniuses. But, at that time there were still a lot of command line utilities in common use and the graphical ones were built with the assumption that the users would need to tie that into knowledge they already had. So, you had the desktop paradigm with things like folders, a desktop and either a trash can or recycle bin depending on the platform. There were even games like minesweeper and solitaire built in to encourage new users to learn how to use the mouse. One of the major changes I've seen over the last couple decades is the assumption that we don't need the handholding and moving away from a shared paradigm. Back in the '90s and earlier developers were a lot more hesitant to abandon the designs that others were developing unless there was good reason for doing so. These days, they'll do it just because it's aesthetically displeasing.
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I remember the DOS manual I got when my parents bought our first computer. It was massive.And there was so much useful stuff in there, along with less useful things like how to change the colors of the command prompt. I think a lot of why that stopped was simply the result of the internet allowing half-finished products to be shipped and as a result there wasn't the same kind of time to develop proper documentation. These manuals were often times being developed in parallelt to the later stages of development so they had a clear cutoff time just before the final touches were completed.
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@jaykayenn The problem isn't the users at this point, the problem is the people designing these things to require manuals in the first place. Things that aren't actually involved in work should mostly just work with the features being discoverable on their own and requiring very little effort to figure out. Things like the popcorn button shouldn't even exist if they aren't going to work right. I'm lucky in that my popcorn button does seem to actually work correctly, same does the sensor reheat button. But, on many microwaves those buttons don't work at all. Anytime the majority of people are doing the wrong thing, it's worth considering why that's the case. You're never going to engineer something that's going to keep the "hold my beer" crowd from hurting themselves, but the interface should make typical tasks intuitive.
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It's really sad that we seem to have peaked with the younger Boomers, entirely of Gen X and maybe a few of the older Millenials. Computers have been getting progressively harder to use because apparently we no longer care about the software working, it just has to look pretty. Even if that means that it doesn't actually work right.
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Even without that it was still possible. My friend's Leading Edge computer forced Mario to jump into a pit. Nobody was even touching any buttons and there Mario goes to the nearest pit to end it all.
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It's a lot easier to do if you've got access to people that are completely ignorant of whatever system you're writing about to try the instructions. It's still not at all easy, but it greatly reduces the likelihood of missing things due to just assuming that people won't do that.
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