Hall Of Technical Documentation Weirdness

An anonymous reader submits: "Generally speaking, with the exception of Tina on Dilbert, technical writers aren't very funny. This is something of a rare and unintentional exception. This guy has assembled a bunch of examples of bizarre technical illustration. There's only about 15 at the moment, but he's collecting further examples."

Comments

It was getting slow.. I have Mirrored it.

[Organized Konfusion]

Mirror be gentle to my host plz ;-)

Huh

[sg3000]

I know that this page should have been funny, but for some reason, I'm not laughing. And I'm even familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.

I kind of expected something like "Engrish" or the often funny Airtoons (but it's probably only funny for those of us that fly a lot). Or even, the hasn't-been-updated-since-the-millennium Kibo and his amusing criticisms of font use or Gerald Holmes, which has outlived the silly .com web awards that are featured on his site. Hooray for Gerald!

Microfortnights

[Christian Engstrom]

The documentation for the VAX/VMS operating system (this was in the eighties, before they started renaiming it every other year) claimed that one of the system parameters in SYSGEN should be specified in "microfortnights", but then proceeded to say that for added convenience, microfortnights were approximated by "seconds". (If you can't be bothered to bring out your calculator, a proper microfortnight would be 1.2096 seconds.)

At least I thought this was rather funny, but perhaps I am just very childish.

Re:Printed on the "Blank" pages of IBM manuals of

[Jeremy Erwin]

They didn't want customers calling them up complaining about missing pages. So, if every blank page had an acknowledgment of the fact that IBM really, truly meant to leave that page unfilled by black text, then the customer could be assured that it wasn't a printing error.

Consumer Reports "selling it"

[hellfire]

Check out the back page of a Consumer Reports magazine. They have great examples of silly ads, bad technical documentation, and veiled attempts at what can only be explained as attempts to rip people off. They are far more entertaining and funny than this list, which is not very funny or entertaining.

I'd have a web link but Consumer Reports website is a subscription based site you have to pay to get into.

Re:Actually, 'may contain peanuts' has a reason

[arivanov]

Hello city boy. Ever been out of there?

1. Ever seen anything growing under a nut tree (assuming we are talking walnut or similar)?

2. Peanuts are dug from the ground so this means disrupting any tree roots that are there.