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Why is RYFM Disease Widespread?
If you got a home computer for Christmas, or just invested in one to
crunch the corporation's numbers, it's just a matter of time. Sooner or
later, you'll be suffering from the dreaded RYFM!
A new social disease? An acronymophobe's nightmare? A sympton of a new era?
YES, to answer all three questions at once!
RYFM stands for READ YOUR *$@()*$ MANUAL! More specifically, it's a nasty name
applied by people who make a living selling computers to people who DON'T read
their computer manuals before asking for help.
I discovered the RYFM syndrome while prowling around my favorite computer
store. A salesman had been on the phone, patiently coaxing an owner thru a bad
case of new-computer blues. After half an hour, he put the phone down and
groaned: "Lord help us, another RYFM!"
But, as one RYFM to another, here's some advice. Feel free to RYFM to your
heart's content. You'll have plenty of company as long as we RYFM's are driven
to react to computer manuals with an exclamation of WIFEP -- or WRITE IN
*$@()*$ ENGLISH PLEASE!
Like many RYFM's, I try to read my manuals. Take, for example, the first bash-
'em-up video game, I thought of buying. Its manual-on-a-folder blithely told me
to "boot the disk in the normal way." As it turned out, even the salesman
couldn't get that program to run, although he did know that booting the disk
involves sliding it into the disk drive, closing the door and turning the
computer on!
Then, there were the three weighty tomes that came with my IBM PC. These
manuals are much praised for clarity and "user-friendliness" by the post-
graduate hackers who seem to review such things for computer mags. True enough,
the IBM manuals contain a hand-holding introduction that tells you step-by-step
how to get started. But, as the manuals get going, the going gets tougher!
For example, you'll be glad to know there's a "MODE" command on the IBM PC
which you can use to "redirect parallel printer output to an Asynchronous
Communications Adapter." Furthermore: "Before you can use MODE to redirect
parallel printer output to a serial device you must initialize the Asynchronous
Communications Adapter by using Option 3 (see above)." The "above" turns out to
be a reference to 1, 2 or 3, which identifies a printer number. Perhaps if I
read my whole -- ahem -- manual, I might figure out what that means. I might
even find out why on earth I'd want to redirect my parallel printer output to
an Asynchronous Communications Adapter!
But if I read my manual, I'd also end up reading about the EXE2BIN command,
which "converts .EXE files which have no segment fixup to a form that is
compatible with .COM programs!"
("Hello, computer store? ...")
Then there's the manual that came with my modem -- the gadget that lets my
computer talk to one of its brethren over the telephone lines. I've been itch-
ing to get my hands on all the free programs available for copying -- over the
phone from other phone-wired computers. I picked the Hayes Smartmodem partly
because its manual was supposed to be easy to read and the gadget, with its
built-in software, easy to use.
So, why have I spent three months trying to figure out how to copy ANYTHING,
much less free programs? This manual tells me how to get "on-line" with a news
service that sends its stories rolling across my screen for me to read. So far
so good.
I see an article I'd like to copy and read at my leisure. To do so, I'm suppos-
ed to: "Press the Capture Key to seize the incoming information!" But which of
the 80-odd keys on my keyboard is the Capture Key? There's nothing I can find
in the chapter on Menu Commands. The Parameters chapter has a whole page on the
Capture Key. But this is the closest it seems to come to telling me which key
to press: "Values: 0..127 ASCII decimal value, Function Keys (see Chapter 1)."
If there's anything in Chapter 1 to tell me what key to press, I couldn't find
it. But, months later, I located the answer in Chapter 3, buried in a sub-
chapter called "Status Lines." It turns out that the Capture Key is one of my
computer's special function keys, the one labelled on my keyboard F4 and the
one labelled on the on-screen "help" line as "Disk:F4."
Silly me. What else would a Capture Key be?
Trouble is, now I'd like to know why the manual says I can "capture" almost any
amount of information that will fit on my disk, while the program seems to be
prompting me to chop up the stuff into a dozen, tiny, inconvenient files!
("Hello, computer store? ...")
From an article by Alison Cunliffe in The Toronto Star of January 6, 1985