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I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen. It's a remarkably handsome manual, beautifully typeset, which, considering par for the course at the time was probably Courier with few illustrations, is saying something.
You get phrases like "With Macintosh, you're in charge." One of the more striking things was how every chapter is introduced with a full-color photo of Macintosh being used.
Macintosh User Manual - Appendices Appendices The first thing I appreciated was how Macintosh is set within somewhat normal (and quite varied) contexts of use. Then I noticed that, with the exception of chapter 5, every photo shows a preppy white male using the computer. Also, why is the keyboard in Chapter 3 positioned like that? The thing you'll notice in Chapter 6 (and maybe you saw it in the Appendix) was the infamous Mac carrying case.
Macintosh User Manual - Introduction Introduction Dig that reflection! Apple returned to the reflection as a visual element a few years ago... Some of the best stuff, of course, is explaining how the thing works.
Macintosh User Manual - Clicking Clicking and Dragging (pretty straightforward) My favorite is scrolling. I can imagine the discussion: "Well, it's called a scroll bar...
Macintosh User Manual - Finder Rooms (And the disk is a.. It's been surprisingly delightful flipping through this little bit of computer history. The pace, and deliberateness, with which the system and its interface are explained are quite impressive.
Some time ago I dug up a //c manual and was caught by similar reactions. I only posted a few shots, but here too, I thought the illustration of scrolling was a favorite.
Permalink I think the hallway he is cycling through is Stanford University. What amazes me is that half these guys could pose as the "I am a PC" in the current ads :) As to the diversity issue, please not again. I worked for years for some evil US corporations and got sick of the need to add every minority to every photo, to me this was a natural thing to happen anyway, it is sad that people feel the need to have to enforce it.
My immediate impression upon looking at chapter 3 was that the keyboard was pushed out of the way because it was "traditional" and could be ignored for so many Mac tasks. It even had a quick primer on user-friendliness for fledgling BASIC programmers.
Permalink Wow, I haven't seen one of these manuals in ages. You're absolutely right about the size of the task before Apple: they had to explain, well, everything about using Macintosh. It's even more astonishing taken in a historical context: this manual turns out to be the set of stone tablets laying down the rules for all subsequent HCI. Note that the Macintosh Basics interactive demo (plus audio tape) served a similar function.
Permalink One error in the photos, though, is that the guy who looks so engrossed by the display in Chapter 1 is staring at a dead screen -- the power switch is off.
As to the question of the tossed-aside keyboard in the Chapter 5 title page, I think the other commenters have it right. Macintosh was the mouse and the mouse was Macintosh, particularly with a GUI element like the Finder. Also, it seem so odd today, but so many of the GUI elements had to be explained in excruciating detail with less-than-perfect analogies as the vast majority of us just had never used an interface like this before.
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