With todays standards that documentation seems alien. It is insanely well worked through.
A glimpse at those docs makes me wonder how much knowledge is just lost due to the plug-n-play 3 page manual era where every project seems like a kinda reboot of the knowledge when the prior engineers left.
To me, it looks like a basic overview-level book on photography, with a focus on Kodak. Aside from the recipes and datasheets, the general information is nowadays available in Wikipedia with a bit less structure but way more detail (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_aberration).
I'd consider it an introductory textbook on photography, not documentation.
More importantly, this seems to be an external, public book, not internal documentation for engineers documenting the in-depth stuff that wasn't public. That would be interesting to see!
Yes, this was for photographers and lab techs who were buying and using Kodak gear and supplies. Every darkroom had one of these, or one very much like it. Nowadays you have to look online and download pdf’s for this sort of thing.
I have an Ektar 203mm lens in Kodak Supermatic shutter, the upgraded version of the anastigmat listed here. The Ektars were Kodak’s top-of-the-line lenses and it still works pretty well on my field camera.
Been dabbling with getting into film photography and that document looks quite useful compared to more generic "how to photograph"-books and web sites.
This books goes into the gritty details which one needs to be able to get good film photos and to repro them as paper photos etc. Things photographers just had to know when working with film.
Earlier you had to either test and document these details by yourself (one didn't have the luxury of Exif image data, one would need to jot the settings per photo into notebook etc), read them or be taught by someone who knew them, so in that sense not the typical intro textbook (ie. John Hedgecoe's Photography Basics etc). This is more akin to SDK reference + combined with Stack Overflow).
You can find old repair manuals for old vintage cameras. Found one for my dad's Kowa Super 66 which I broke after 11 rolls.
We have entered a time where the first generation of people who grew-up with the internet part of their entire lives are now in charge. What to older generations is terrible UX and bad or completely lacking documentation to them is just normal.
IBM used to have great documentation for their systems, which they happily charged their customers money for hard copies. There really was not digital documentation. Microsoft has recently turned around the direction of their digital documentation (in a good way), which has been a huge organizational effort.
Every generation knows something preceding and succeeding generations do not.
IBM charged, yes, but UNIX shipped with online manpages (printed out in full as a bindered reference in the terminal labs at my uni), which documented not only userland commands, but system calls, library functions, device drivers, games!, file formats, and other information.
Access to Unix, a remote (shared) compute resource (sit down at any terminal and log in), "write" and "talk" (after the first three-digit phone bill on a long-distance relationship), FTP sites, Usenet, and the online computerised library catalogue (backed by a paper resource rather than webpages) was a 10-20 year future timewarp for me in the mid-1980s. Little of this was accessible to anyone outside a limited (though at the time fairly substantial) number of universities and a handful of tech companies and government offices, nor would it be for another decade or more for the most part.
In terms of online access to published information, it's only been the emergence of Sci-Hub and Library Genesis, in the past 5 years or so, that's matched the earlier access I'd had. Access, I'll note, which I didn't make up for by paying academic-publishing highway-robbery rates, but simply went without (or satisficed with very occasional author-dropped copies on academic homepages).
Quality of documentation has of course varied. But the tradition of freely-available online information does date to the 1970s, and was very well established by the 1980s.
That's not what I mean. I thought I wouldn't need to explain, but as far as everyone knows Kodak is no longer a major player in photography[1]. I wanted to imply that they had a lot of institutional momentum tied up in film, and if they had taken the approach you stated - which you exaggerated as "3 page manual era where every project seems like a kinda reboot of the knowledge when the prior engineers left" - they could have pivoted to the new market (i.e. digital cameras) easily. They were very committed to film, as everyone knows. (I thought this would go without saying.)
So handbooks like this can be seen as a "Kodak moment" of formalizing institutional knowledge. In new markets (which may be the future) there isn't going to be institutional knowledge yet.
Something similar might be the case with extremely serious car manufacturers with many decades of first-rate knowledge in building combustion engine cars.
[1] "January 19, 2012: Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company's stock was delisted from NYSE and moved to OTC exchange. ... Once the digital camera business is phased out, Kodak said its consumer business will focus on printing. It will seek a company to license its EasyShare digital camera brand."
It kind of still is a major player in the _film photography_ scene at least. Kodak Alaris[1][2] still produces film and development chemicals + other photography related gear and services. It just isn't that kind of big mammoth it was before the bankruptcy.
In addition of being still alive in one form or another, their film business is getting better as people end up more and more getting into film photography. They actually announced that they cannot meet the current demand and are raising film prices and investing into new capacity[3].
A glimpse at those docs makes me wonder how much knowledge is just lost due to the plug-n-play 3 page manual era where every project seems like a kinda reboot of the knowledge when the prior engineers left.