I’m a big fan of instruction manuals, and I find a perverse sort of pleasure in reading them - even though I never really do when I get the gadget first. I wing it, trying to see if I could get it to run and at what point I’d actually have to RTFM.

I believe I once actually had a manual for the first Mac, but of course it’s been filed away in the Twilight Zone. If you’d like a chance to see how user’s manuals for the first Macintosh looked like (yes, Virginia, there were paper instruction books back in the day, made of real paper), check out this Flickr album from a guy named Peter Merholz, who found an original manual in a garage sale somewhere. He blogs about it here.

Dated, but still cool, and designed very nicely.