Word: booklets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Reagan administration has protested that this document was the product of an overzealous contract worker, a simple mistake. That's the problem. This booklet clearly explains the tactics and intentions of our Nicauraguan mercenaries, something Reagan would do only by accident. The Administration has been supporting a small army that hopes to gain power by assassination and hold it through intimidation, precisely the qualities abhorred in the Sandinista government...
...slogan helped sell millions of Eastman Kodak cameras starting in 1888. Today, however, the owner of a new video cassette recorder or some other electronic wonder must turn to an instruction manual to get his machine working. But that is often when the trouble begins: the consumer opens a booklet to find a compilation of jargon, gibberish and just plain confusion. "There is a major disease in this country called wall-stare," says Sanford Rosen, president of Communication Sciences, a Minneapolis consulting firm. "When people read a computer manual, they just want to put it down and stare...
...television sets and antennas. Owners must often pick their way through mazes of diagrams and technical terms like "One-touch type F connector" that seem to have been written for licensed electricians. Some manuals compound the confusion with illustrations that differ from the actual machine. Notes the 46-page booklet for a Panasonic OmniVision model: "Please be assured that this difference is not due to mistake but to ongoing product improvement...
Manuals for smaller, less expensive items can also be frustrating. Instructions for a Pulsar digital quartz watch ($59) go on for 13 pages before telling how to set the time. One Hewlett-Packard financial calculator ($110) comes with an operating booklet that runs to 246 pages of small type. The company supplements that with a 170-page training guide that sells for $15. "People have said we should do something like this for all our manuals," observes Janet Cryer, who wrote the guide...
Many retailers are impressed with the manual for Apple's new Macintosh computer. Designed to be used with tapes and video displays, it guides Macintosh owners gently through a technological thicket. Says Chris Espinosa, 22, an eight-year Apple veteran who supervised the booklet's preparation: "A good manual is not a narrative; it is an outline or report. Nobody ever reads a manual cover to cover-only mutants do that...