On 2/03/2019 4:55 am, Seymour J Metz wrote:
I can see making copies for laptops off of the Internet, but dead tree? I wish
I didn't believe you.
You can tell the people who learned from printed manuals from those who
use only softcopy ones - the people who learned from softcopy ask "How
do I do..." and the people who learned from hardcopy answer them.
(Mostly joking!)
I suspect most of us on this list are old enough to have started in
mainframe with hardcopy manuals. We may not appreciate how difficult it
is to learn z/OS without them.
When learning a complex new concept, a hardcopy manual where you can
stick a finger in a page, flip backwards, view multiple pages at once,
refer to another chapter etc. is much easier than softcopy. Is it
surprising that a 1000 page manual contains information that softcopy
users never see?
There's a couple of manuals I print in full, more often I will print a
chapter or 2. Even then the majority of time I use softcopy, but
occasionally when it's a complex topic and my brain starts to strain I
pull out the hardcopy. I almost always learn something new as I flip
through to the correct chapter.
I could postulate that the technologies that have met with most
resistance on the mainframe (e.g. z/OS Unix, Java) are those that came
along after the switch to softcopy manuals, so people never had the
opportunity to read and learn from hardcopy.
Andrew Rowley
----------------------------------------------------------------------
For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions,
send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
