I loved the ring binder manuals even though they were harder to read (but great to refer to as they'd open flat) and updates would say "replace page 6 with this, add page 10-A between 10 and 11", etc.
IMHO, software documentation has dropped because it's hard to write the documentation when the software isn't finished, and software isn't finished anymore.
Games (and other software) used to come with a large manual, and then a single folded sheet that had quick start instructions and updates to the manual. The large manual had to be finalizes before the disk images, in order to get them made on time... but the software had to be firmed up. Now, it's very common to have a huge day one patch, which could change a tremendous amount of things. You can't print a manual that addresses that, and nobody wants to retain writing staff to do constant updates.
Software not being "done" is a huge part of it now, because things change so relatively rapidly now that there's no real "point" to printed documentation (things like the "Missing Manual" series to the side) and it's all been replaced with tutorials and searches.
It's much better now, mind you, there was a quite bad time in the late 90s early 2000s where the printed manuals were going away but the "online help" features of the programs were pretty crappy (even if just that you couldn't read the help and look at the program at the same time).
And computers are much more powerful now so you can 'afford' to make things more discoverable and easy to figure out; many early software packages are completely obtuse (even games) without studying how to use them.
Interestingly the "no printed manual" really started much earlier in the Unix world with 'man' pages. Some early Unix documentation books are just literally printed man pages.
Great point. The obvious explanation for less documentation is that customers don't care much, and the obvious explanation for why customers don't care is that Stackoverflow/Google/etc. works fine in practice.
I still think dumping support on google and even a vendor's own "community" forum where they don't actually bother to provide support is a cheap-out.
But yeah if documentation was valued by customers, they would compare products on this point. But they don't.
As a syadmin I do sometimes hate this because our company often buys product with really poor documentation and support (and the documentation often hidden behind a loginwall too).
Microsoft has decent documentation I have to say. But when something doesn't work as it says, their support is terrible. It becomes a yes/no game ("It should work according to the docs", "Yes I know but it doesn't") and then when that finishes they keep stalling by asking to upgrade to the ever-available 'latest version' and provide more and more logs, by which time there is yet another new version and we start the whole circus again.
In the end I more often find the answer on community resources like admin slack groups (MacAdmins is great in particular). But really, this is not how things should work.
Back in those days software came in a box and the box contained the media for the software and at least one book, which was the user manual. Some software included multiple numbers of books, covering different topics. But these were real books written by technical writers with 200+ page counts.
In world of the internet, that information has moved online, and the days of hiring technical writers to producing technical documents, is not as common as it once was.
