[dragonwriter]

> Compilers came with comprehensive manuals. When you paid for things like Turbo C++ or Paradox or MS Cobol you got a well edited, indexed and quality printed book that covered the entire language and tools comprehensively.

Often, three or more books: commonly a library reference (which was just what it says, but with a lot more detail than many packages today have with their low-effort, auto-generated API docs), a programmer's guide​ (a comprehensive guide to the language supported), and a user's guide (a guide to the tooling provided.)

The web has made finding answers to hard questions quite a bit easier, but it's also made the basics quite a bit harder. Current (to the software version you are using), correct, and clear information covering the majority of things most people would use was a lot easier to find when getting a compiler meant getting books with exactly that information.

[badsectoracula]

Note that, FWIW, Free Pascal today comes with the same manuals - a user's guide (telling you how to install and use the compiler, the IDE and the various tools), a programmer's guide (telling you implementation details for the language), a language reference (explaining the language itself, in theory you can make your own compiler from that), a runtime library reference (what the name implies) and a framework reference (reference for the extra libraries that usually come with FPC). Also there is a reference for the documentation generator in case you need to write docs yourself.

https://www.freepascal.org/docs.var