I have a copy of this on a shelf by my desk. From Chapter 1 - "Whatever else you do, keep using the computer. If you have the question “what does it do if I tell it such and such?” then the answer is easy: type it in and see. Whenever the manual tells you to type something in, always ask yourself, “what could I type instead?“, and try out your replies. The more of your own programs you write, the better you will understand the computer."
The other book that came with the machine has a quote that I think kicked off my career as an engineer - "Now that you have set up the computer, you will want to use it. The rest of this booklet tells you how to do that; but in your impatience you will probably already have started pressing the keys on the keyboard, and discovered that this removes the copyright message. This is good; you cannot harm the computer in this way. Be bold. Experiment. If you get stuck, remember that you can always reset the computer to the original picture with the copyright message by taking out the '9V DC IN' plug and putting it back again. This should be the last resort because you lose all the information in the computer."
Me too.
I remember going through the "Beyond ZX Spectrum" was it? it had listings of basic programs for "Lunar Lander" and other nice games. With colorful inspiring screenshots of the running games.
Me too, here. It was a significant reassurance, and I was later disappointed to learn that the PC operating system did not have that same quality that earlier microcomputers had.
PCs were cobbled together in a way that earlier microcomputers were not - individual pieces of hardware could all be from different vendors, and adhering to a bunch of protocols, some of them proprietary. Then on top of that you had several different OS options (even if only considering DOS, there were still several), all of which had to support all the aforementioned hardware somehow. It's not surprising that nobody could guarantee the safety of all possible combinations - that's the price you pay for customizability.
