Reading old Cisco manuals on a rainy afternoon

I keep a few printed manuals on the bottom shelf, mostly out of sentiment. Last week, when it was too wet to do anything outdoors, I pulled down the IOS configuration guide from sometime around 2003 and read it for an hour. It is, against expectation, a wonderful document.

What surprises me each time I open one of these things is how generous the prose is. The authors seem to have assumed the reader was not in a hurry. They explain the why of OSPF area design before they get to the commands. They tell you when a feature was added and why. The diagrams are hand-drawn in a way that makes you trust them.

Modern vendor documentation has, by and large, lost this. The pages are generated, the examples are minimal, the prose is the bare connective tissue between configuration snippets. You can find what you need, if you already know what to look for. You cannot read it from the front.

I am not nostalgic for typewriters. I do not want to go back to a world where the documentation was on paper and the search was your finger. But the old manuals had a kind of patience, an assumption that you were learning the material rather than racing through it, that I find I miss whenever I open the current version of anything.

If you have a rainy afternoon and a manual you have never read, try the experiment. Start at chapter one. See how far you get.