                       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
 
