86 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
86 lines
4.7 KiB
Plaintext
Why is RYFM Disease Widespread?
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If you got a home computer for Christmas, or just invested in one to
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crunch the corporation's numbers, it's just a matter of time. Sooner or
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later, you'll be suffering from the dreaded RYFM!
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A new social disease? An acronymophobe's nightmare? A sympton of a new era?
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YES, to answer all three questions at once!
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RYFM stands for READ YOUR *$@()*$ MANUAL! More specifically, it's a nasty name
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applied by people who make a living selling computers to people who DON'T read
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their computer manuals before asking for help.
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I discovered the RYFM syndrome while prowling around my favorite computer
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store. A salesman had been on the phone, patiently coaxing an owner thru a bad
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case of new-computer blues. After half an hour, he put the phone down and
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groaned: "Lord help us, another RYFM!"
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But, as one RYFM to another, here's some advice. Feel free to RYFM to your
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heart's content. You'll have plenty of company as long as we RYFM's are driven
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to react to computer manuals with an exclamation of WIFEP -- or WRITE IN
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*$@()*$ ENGLISH PLEASE!
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Like many RYFM's, I try to read my manuals. Take, for example, the first bash-
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'em-up video game, I thought of buying. Its manual-on-a-folder blithely told me
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to "boot the disk in the normal way." As it turned out, even the salesman
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couldn't get that program to run, although he did know that booting the disk
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involves sliding it into the disk drive, closing the door and turning the
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computer on!
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Then, there were the three weighty tomes that came with my IBM PC. These
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manuals are much praised for clarity and "user-friendliness" by the post-
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graduate hackers who seem to review such things for computer mags. True enough,
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the IBM manuals contain a hand-holding introduction that tells you step-by-step
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how to get started. But, as the manuals get going, the going gets tougher!
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For example, you'll be glad to know there's a "MODE" command on the IBM PC
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which you can use to "redirect parallel printer output to an Asynchronous
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Communications Adapter." Furthermore: "Before you can use MODE to redirect
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parallel printer output to a serial device you must initialize the Asynchronous
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Communications Adapter by using Option 3 (see above)." The "above" turns out to
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be a reference to 1, 2 or 3, which identifies a printer number. Perhaps if I
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read my whole -- ahem -- manual, I might figure out what that means. I might
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even find out why on earth I'd want to redirect my parallel printer output to
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an Asynchronous Communications Adapter!
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But if I read my manual, I'd also end up reading about the EXE2BIN command,
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which "converts .EXE files which have no segment fixup to a form that is
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compatible with .COM programs!"
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("Hello, computer store? ...")
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Then there's the manual that came with my modem -- the gadget that lets my
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computer talk to one of its brethren over the telephone lines. I've been itch-
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ing to get my hands on all the free programs available for copying -- over the
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phone from other phone-wired computers. I picked the Hayes Smartmodem partly
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because its manual was supposed to be easy to read and the gadget, with its
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built-in software, easy to use.
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So, why have I spent three months trying to figure out how to copy ANYTHING,
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much less free programs? This manual tells me how to get "on-line" with a news
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service that sends its stories rolling across my screen for me to read. So far
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so good.
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I see an article I'd like to copy and read at my leisure. To do so, I'm suppos-
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ed to: "Press the Capture Key to seize the incoming information!" But which of
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the 80-odd keys on my keyboard is the Capture Key? There's nothing I can find
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in the chapter on Menu Commands. The Parameters chapter has a whole page on the
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Capture Key. But this is the closest it seems to come to telling me which key
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to press: "Values: 0..127 ASCII decimal value, Function Keys (see Chapter 1)."
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If there's anything in Chapter 1 to tell me what key to press, I couldn't find
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it. But, months later, I located the answer in Chapter 3, buried in a sub-
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chapter called "Status Lines." It turns out that the Capture Key is one of my
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computer's special function keys, the one labelled on my keyboard F4 and the
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one labelled on the on-screen "help" line as "Disk:F4."
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Silly me. What else would a Capture Key be?
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Trouble is, now I'd like to know why the manual says I can "capture" almost any
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amount of information that will fit on my disk, while the program seems to be
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prompting me to chop up the stuff into a dozen, tiny, inconvenient files!
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("Hello, computer store? ...")
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From an article by Alison Cunliffe in The Toronto Star of January 6, 1985
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