He fixed the Customer, not the Machine.

Sometimes the urge to 'fix' customers in a BOfH manner is quite high.

huge stack of manuals

Way back in my first role at a government establishment (not a secret one) 40 years ago we ran a couple of DEC VAX minis (an 11/780 and an 11/750) plus we had an ageing PDP 11/45 that was never actually turned on (we couldn't dispose of it as part of the purchase for the VAXen was that they were compatible).

We had a whole bookcase filled with the manuals for the two different systems, all in ring binders, so once a month my job as the junior was to go through all the issued updates and addenda, removing the old pages and inserting the new ones. It wasn't exactly a difficult task but you had to be very methodical (I would always tear the redundant pages out so they couldn't be mixed up with the new ones).

Towards the end of my time there I also acquired a DEC Alpha (another load of manuals of course) and we installed an LN03 Laser Printer so I had my first exposure to word processing - great, I could type my own letters, print them out and send them to the typing pool to be retyped!

Ah, good times. I remember my first "real" job as a developer.

We had 1 bookcase full of the VMS (+DCL) manuals.

Another bookcase was filled with manuals for the development tools: Rdb, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Forms, Rally and some others I never touched.

But then the Web happened, and I never again opened another bookcase like that.

I'm sure I read a story somewhere, possibly even on here, that the reason Novell provided a shelf-full of very visible (bright red more or less) manuals for Netware was because the software itself originally came on a single floppy disk.

IT had to be able to show something tangible to the bean-counters / senior management for the very large sum they had forked out just for the software.

RTFM was superseded by JFGI!

I don't know what people do these days, now that Google have enshitified their product so much.

I use perplexity - it provides source links in line to help you weed out the inevitable AI hallucinations

Superseded by JFAAI (*) ... and then users promptly suffer a psychotic episode when it suggests that there is a problem between keyboard and chair?

(*) Just Fucking Ask AI

Can't be super-seeded by JFAAI, cos any fule know that JFAAI are seedless!

--------> Mine's the one with suspiciously orange peel in the pocket!

I used RTFM once, and was told off for including an obscenity.

I had been told it stood for Read The Fine Manual :-)

Whenever I've had to explain it I just say it stands for "Read The Manual"... let them fill in the blank themselves.

Read The Friendly Manual

*Then* come back to annoy the dev who is getting less friendly by the minute (but isn't allowed to *quite* say what he is thinking by this point; what is that grinding noise?)

(Had a ThinkGeek mug marked RTFM on my desk - often pointed at me when the compiler objected at my syntax - because they never did a "No, I am not a tier 1 help desk" mug)

When we bought a MicroVAX 1 in 1984, the pallet containing the manuals was larger (and heavier) than the one containing the machine itself :-)

During my early days in the oil and gas exploration sector (in the early 1980's), there was a rumour flying around suppliers that some of the large project engineering bodies had a set of weight scales in their goods-in areas: inspection involved weighing the paperwork - and rejection if the documentation wasn't heavier than the product.

Those were the days . . .

Dragged out of bed on a saturday to visit an electricity prepayment machine that was feeling unwell.

Hot footed at across South Wales to the west coast to be greeted by a working machine.

The normal fix was to re-authenticate the device if the users forgot the power on PIN saving any miscreants vending free leccy.

It turned out that a remote fix had become available utilising the land line number and a remote dial in to confirm correct ownership.

When I called the ticket in and had a bit of a moan about 100 miles of wasted trip I was asked if I'd read the manual. The manual that was updated via the postie who arrived after I'd arrived on site.

Meh.

At a recent job interview I talked about "sitting down with the books" when talking about something with which I was passingly familiar but keen to learn about. It only doing the post-interview mental review as I drove home afterwards that I started to wonder when I last sat down with an physical book in my hands, probably from O'Reilly.

We once ordered the manuals for an old Juniper router recently retired and destined to be a training aid.

The ordering website showed a shelf full of books, and indeed, the manuals did turn up on a pallet.

With a single CDROM attached to it by clingfilm.

Ah, the days when there was a physical manual which explained EVERYTHING.

Got an error? All errors are in book 34, appendix 17.

Lucky you.

I was also lucky enough to find employment in an employee-focused company.

Then it got bought by Americans, and everything went to shit.