My own understanding lies somewhere in between only being on-line, and
having entire manuals. I will occasionally print extended sections that
require me to follow a series of steps, or make annotations specific to
my own use. The former get recycled, and the latter generally wind up
getting filed for future reference. But since I live in cyberspace, I
try to do what I can there, reading off of my monitor, and eschew hard
copy.

One of the things I find genuinely frightening about people in this
industry are those who only speak one platform, calling the function
keys PF keys, or job streams JCL, or the 3K 'the mainframe', or their
Wintel box a terminal, or vice versa. It's genuinely a "paradigm shift",
a way of thinking, a state of mind. Much of what we do is digital, not
material. This is why I couldn't put "Being Digital" down; for me, it
touched this nerve.

When I took Principles of Adult Education, my prof told to pass out a
copies of my overheads for the hands-on learners, such as herself. She
explained that for a lot of people, if they cannot touch it, it isn't
real. This seems a liability to me, at least in this business.

And manuals printed from the LaserROM lack those all important page
numbers. Printing entire manuals does not seem to me to be genuinely
useful, unless I am undergoing a total immersion in the subject of the
manual. As for Joe's setup, and ours here, the manual is a close as the
nearest PC, and can have as many users as there are PCs, and is never
"missing". Now that's convenient. If only the LaserROM software was
better, or replaced altogether with searchable HTML, and they didn't
have text-as-graphics. Sounds like what Wirt is doing with his manual is
>pretty much like this; if only HP was thus minded...