Re: Help!

[Hendrik Boom <hendrik@pooq.com>]

On Sat, Sep 10, 2005 at 05:56:32PM -0400, C Shore wrote:
> 
> Seriously, the standard man page format wasn't designed for mass usage, 
> it was for the sysadmin who needed a reference to remind them of some 
> obscure (or not) feature they had forgotten, not to teach the usage of 
> the command.

Actually, man pages *were* intended to introduce newbies to the system.
Way back in the seventies, when Unix was first released on the world,
man pages *were* all the documentation available, except for a kind
of cover letter that said to use the man command to find the documentation.
IIRC, it advised me to use a command something like "man intro"
for my first introduction, shich consisted mostly of hints what
man pages to use.  (it probably was a different word from "intro" --
it was a long time ago and I really forget the details.

Of course, back then, the target audience was people with computer
science degrees or the equivalent, and yes, you are right, that wasn't
a mass audience in the 1970's.