Stan writes (to me privately, it now appears, but I'll go ahead and break the
bounds of good manners and answer Stan's comments anyway):

> John asks:
>
>  >     I have a dumb question.  How did you find that manual?  I looked on
>  > the docs website before I sent that message.  I couldn't find the
>  > Switch Programmer's User Guide.
>
>  Ditto...I find that the manuals on the docs.hp.com web site are
>  rather astoundingly difficult to use.  If you don't get lucky and stumble
>  over the manual you want, forget it.

I took John's question to be more rhetorical than interrogatory, so I didn't
answer, but let me respond to Stan's comments by answering John's "dumb"
question. The method I used was:

     o I went to the 5.0 manuals page (which is the complete set of manuals,
obviously minus the stuff that got put in 5.5, such as network printing).

     o Rather than read down the long list of manuals, I pressed Cntl+F to
get into Netscape's FIND mode, where I typed: "Intrinsics", so that I could
find the intrinsics manual instantly.

     o Once found, I then hyperlinked to the Intrinsics manual, where I again
pressed Cntl+F and searched for the word "switch," which brought me directly
the appropriate intrinsics (and their links to the manual pages).

     o I then hyperlinked back to the 5.0 manual page and pressed Cntl+F once
more, leaving the same word ("switch") in the slot and instantly found the
hyperlink to the Switch Programmer's User Guide. I then the read the section
headings, and voila, there I was, intrinsic manual page and appropriate
programmer's guide pages printed, consuming all of 15 seconds.

In mild disagreement with Stan, I really like the 5.0/5.5 manual format. I
can find almost anything instantly, even as it is now, without a search
engine. What I really like about the text-based format is how easy it is to
read on the screen and how fast it loads off of the internet.

Unfortunately, I remain unenthusiastic about the Instant Information format
of the 6.0 manuals.



>  I tried to find the Switch Programming User's Guide, and failed ...
>  until I went back and said "hey, the link to the 5.0 manuals is different
>  than the link to the 6.0 manuals...the 5.0 manuals haven't been dynamited,
>  er, dynawebbed" ... and followed it, and then saw the manual in question.
>
>  For whatever reason, the major search engines don't seem to have much
>  indexed on these pages (I searched for "HPUNLOADCM" for example).
>  I did just submit http://docs.hp.com/mpeix/docs5/ix5000.htm to
>  AltaVista and google (www.google.com), and will check back in a few days
>  (if I remember :) to see if it has helped.

As it occurs, back in February when these manuals were first put up, Lars and
I each submitted them to AltaVista. As Stan says, for some reason the great
bulk of the text in the manuals was not indexed. Either the robots failed to
properly trace out the links -- or the robots have some internal limits
regarding how much material they'll search through, or how deep.

Wirt Atmar