"Life it too short to read the manual"

[Garth Wilson]

It's a chicken-and-egg situation. Younger people did not live back when there were well-written manuals, so they don't want to read. Manufacturers assume that no one reads the manual anyway, so why put the time and expense into writing a good one. HP wrote absolutely outstanding manuals in the 1980's. When I got my 41cx and 71B, I read the manuals all the way through, and although I'm not much of a reader, I enjoyed them. When I got to the end, I felt I knew the product, even though I had never gotten to "the hard part" (because there was no "hard part"). In the following years, I have tried to imitate HP's way when I have written manuals for our company's products.