I remember the days when telephones came with 3-sentence instructions: (1) When the telephone rings, pick up the mouthpiece and say “hello”. (2) When you are through talking, replace the mouthpiece. (3) When you want to make a call, pick up the mouthpiece and dial the number you want. Now telephones come with instruction books containing hundreds of pages. Is there any commonly used device which has so increased in complexity over the years? ( I was tempted to say the automobile, but then I remembered that when I learned to drive I had to worry about a clutch, a gear shift, a throttle, a choke, and sticking my hand out the window to give hand signals when I wanted to make a turn. It’s lot easier now.)
You can’t measure complexity by the length of the instruction manual. I remember getting two fat books with my Apple ][ computer, and you don’t get a manual at all (aside from a pitiful startup booklet) when you buy a Windows or Mac system, yet these new systems are orders of magnitude more complex.
What InvisibleWombat said. Your three sentence telephone instructions would be applicable to pretty much any modern telephone. The complication is only relevent when you are doing things with your telephone that were not previously available.
Computer manuals are longer than ever. They just don’t print them out anymore. On the computer isn’t so bad (no books gathering dust etc.) unless you can’t get the computer on to read the manual.
Except the part about dialing 
. Seems to me that calculators have the same issue. The first calculators were fairly simple and didn’t need many instructions. Look at the instructions for one of the fancier calculations that engineers or statisticians might use (yes, there are still lots of the simpler calculators around, but it’s not hard to find simple telephones as well).
Nah. I disagree.
My first X86 Unix distro in the mid-90s came with a pile of manuals that probably took up a foot and a half of shelf space. When I got my latest Linux distro, I got two books (probably three inches thick between the two of them) that contained everything I needed to know.
When I was working with FORTRAN on IBM mainframes, the FORTRAN manuals took a monstrous amount of space. There was a whole freaking book just for error messages. The last programming language I bought that actually came with a manual (Borland Delphi) was a lot more complex than FORTRAN IV, but had about a quarter as much documentation–and the documentation seemed comprehensive to me.
I think we’ve gotten a lot better at writing computer manuals these days, and the products don’t need so much documentation, either.
My engineering calculator’s manual is 300 pages long, a nice perfect-bound book. The calculator is an HP 48GX.
No, I don’t know what half the stuff in there does anymore, even with the instructions.
I suspect that not even the person who designed them could tell you what every button on the average DVD or VCR remote does.
I never buy anything that the manual is bigger than the object!!
Spelling and grammer subject to change without notice.
The use of a telephone has gotten simpler, to some extent, if only because now I don’t think anyone in the US has to deal with the hassles of party lines. (“Am I long-long-short or long-short-long or…?”) The telephones themselves have gotten somewhat more complex, going from the early switch-only to rotary to touch-tone, but, one, you don’t need to use every feature your phone has and, two, you can still buy quite simple ones.
We’ve gotten better at interface design, and the dropping cost of computer resources has enabled us to develop some very elaborate interfaces with plenty of online help and meaningful error messages.
On the other end of the spectrum, the semi-mythical Average Consumer assumed by marketing divisions the nation over has become more knowledgeable about computers and phones and DVD players and all of our other technological artifacts. Phones no longer ship with the three-sentence manuals remembered by the OP because the knowledge of how to work a phone is simply assumed. Cell phones and TV remote controls and DVDs are all examples of things most people in this country are expected to already know how to use.
Heh, then you would have missed out on some great computer games.
Sadly, they no longer seem to include the big content-rich manuals either.
You’re right, and what’s even more annoying to me is than no two have the same way to program the memory, or to retrieve from the memory. I have several cordless phones, and every time somebody’s number changes, have to dig out the manuals to re-program them. Bummer!
The manual that came with visual c++.net is small. There is however a fantastic online/on computer documentation that if printed out would be huge. Each API routine has an explaination of what it does and some example code.