The Other Thing That Was Great About Early 8-Bit Computers

🎹 Music for this post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vQpW9XRiyM.

John Gruber had a great post earlier this year about Macintosh System 1.0 with a link to Kevin Fox’s marvelous scan of the original Macintosh user manual.

With all of the recent reminiscence of the early 8-bit era, I am reminded of the early user manuals that came with those machines. My VIC-20 came with a spiral-bound book called “Personal Computing on the VIC-20: A Friendly Computer Guide.” I still have it, along with a large collection of other 8-bit memorabilia.

The manual had lucid writing like this:

And let us not forget magazines like Compute!, Compute!’s Gazette, inCider and Antic.

Old man again: How lucky we were to have this kind of instruction! I miss this kind of writing.