Hall Of Technical Documentation Weirdness

An anonymous reader submits: "Generally speaking, with the exception of Tina on Dilbert, technical writers aren't very funny. This is something of a rare and unintentional exception. This guy has assembled a bunch of examples of bizarre technical illustration. There's only about 15 at the moment, but he's collecting further examples."

This guy's collection will grow large

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

... because the pieces he exhibits aren't funny or weird, they are just pathetic examples of badly written documentation, and those have existed since electronic devices have grown more complex than kitchen appliances, and their docs started to be written in japanglish.

And quite frankly, the "kind of dirty" ones wouldn't even be half-dirty for women in a covent.

The only interest of those technical docs is (1) to learn how to not write them like that, and (2) to witness the birth of early mangas.

If you enjoy bad translations into English...

[JaredOfEuropa]

Visit engrish.com [engrish.com]! Hours of fun...

Re:Others

[zx75]

Hey, you know what? I have a cousin who has screwed up a pizza-in-a-box twice now, once because he didn't take off the plastic, and the second time because he didn't take the cardboard out from under it...

Maybe some people need those warnings. :)

The TeXbook

[TeXMaster]

When I read the first line of this post I instantly thought of the TeXbook. Knuth points out that most manuals are dull and boring, and goes on saying that this manual (the TeXbook, and similarly for the METAFONTbook) is different in that it contains jokes here and there. And in fact this is true, even though the jokes are very "technical". But is the really good technical fun, not the one that comes from misprints originated by typos or ignorance. After all, how many nongeeks would laugh for the average www.userfriendly.org strip?

I must protest.

[blang]

technical writers aren't very funny

I am not a technical writer, but in my experience, the technical writers are consistently the funniest and most diverse group in the company, and they often have some artistic hobby, and some are writing a novel on their spare time. Novelists are technical writers while they wait for publication. Stand up comedians tend to work in call centers.

Re:Others

[sketerpot]

For other things like this (which you are told to avoid), check out the classic Strunk and White [bartleby.com]. (Note: this link goes to the first edition, which was just "Strunk", but that's the best we can do with these ridiculous copyright terms....)

Re:the ibm/pc looking like the macintosh model...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Quadra 800 case (also as you say used in the early 8x00 series and made longer in the 9500) began life as one of the first PC AT towers made by Acer.

I have an Acer S2 from 1989 and a Powermac 8500 from 1996, and the cases are identical. Even the floppy drive bezels are swappable.

The power button on the Acer is in the middle of the case where the 8500 has its Apple logo however.

Actually, 'may contain peanuts' has a reason

[Polyphemis]

For the life of me, I googled for it and I still can't find where I read this originally, but IIRC, the warning "May Contain Nuts" was on bags of peanuts because peanuts and nuts are two entirely different types of nuts, and some people have violent allergic reactions to nuts but NOT peanuts.

The explanation I remember went like this: Peanuts and nuts are harvested in the same fields and often use the same bags to dump them in when they're collected, and those bags sometimes get stray nuts stuck inside of them among all the peanuts. Hence, there is a possibility that nuts MAY be contained within the peanut package since there's really no feasible way to sort through every single individual peanut and try to find the nut, and that anyone that's allergic to nuts needs to be wary.

If anyone knows what I'm talking about and has a clearer recollection, or, even better, a link explaining this, speak up!

Notes on schematics

[Anonymous Coward]

In the early 70s, I came across a schematic for a guitar amplifier and in the small notes section that nobody ever reads (except me), which normally notes things like capacitor voltage and resistor wattage, there was this note

Dogs are faster in Greenland because the trees are farther apart.

Its been 30 years, and every schematic that I've drawn since, I've followed that lead and added that same note...

Re:This page left blank

[TeXMaster]

The weiredest "This page intentionally left blank" messages I've seen (apart from the "This note intentionally left, Blanc" joke in one of those Adventure-like games) was the online manual for Lucid3D.

Lucid3D, for those who don't remember it, was the first spreadsheet programs that supported "transparent" links between spreadsheets, long before Lotus or Quattro supported them. It wasn't really three-dimensional (there *was* a three-dimensional spreadsheet some time ago, but didn't get much notice, because it was somewhat clumsly to use on 2D screens ...).

Lucid3D had a comprehensive online help system (callable via the mouse: the whole program was *designed* the mouse), showing single-page descriptions of all the features and functions it had. BUT, the help system could also be browsed like a book, starting from the first "screen" down to the bottom.

If you did follow this route (I discovered it by chance), you would actually see, once in a while, "screens" that had nothing to do with Lucid3D, but were rather quotes from books, poems, etc (mostly quotes on writing), just like if they had to "fill up" blank pages. The only one I remember is the famous quote from Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

Wonder if this is the oldest Easter Egg in computing?

Re:Others

[Biffer4810]

Naw, the "may contain peanuts" is just a generic CYA. Being one of the Half Percent of the population [ucl.ac.uk] with this life-threatening allergy, I know that even a dust sized particle could be fatal.

This warning "may contain peanuts" etc is placed on many products that are simply near, or which may have come into contact with, peanuts at the time of manufacture (i.e. Milky Way bars run on the same conveyor belt as Snickers, etc).

So corporations have [thankfully] started to add this warning to products so that customers will know whether there is a decent chance that the food has contacted peanuts at any time (and of course to cover their own asses from the lawsuits that would follow).

This allergy is becoming more and more common. Learning some of these basic facts [ucl.ac.uk] could save a life or avoid a new case in a child you know.

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