Found three new IBM PC reference manuals to compete with my IBM PC documentation set. As usual, they are remarkable. When you compare them to today’s – to be downloaded PDF – documentation, you come to regret the “good old times”. Just think about it. Today, the approach is more to not disclose features and it is up to the user to find them out. I guess that it reduces the support costs, and demonstrates that features are not selling points anymore. The Technical Reference manual is exemplary. In particular, the BIOS source code is provided, accompanying the hardware schematics. Excellent reads and a good lesson for technical writers.

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