Who wants printed manuals? The binders that came with the original IBM PC were nice but those machine did not have hard drives much less 100 gigabytes or more. All of the Doc could be put on the drive and the user could burn it to CD or delete it. Printed Doc is too hard to search.
But I have gone to a major book store and just gone down a rack of computer books looking for the term "von neumann machine" and not found a single book with a good explanation. Most don't have the term at all. One book mentioned von Neumann but he was just listed with other people like Turing and Aiken and Babbage. The really weird thing is that a lot of those with diagrams have arrows on both ends of the address bus like it is bidirectional. It is unidirectional. The address signals only go from the CPU out. How so many books get that wrong is beyond me.
Chapter 10 of The Art of Electronics is the best but that book does not use the term "von Neumann machine".
It is funny how these palefaces compartMENTALIZE knowledge and then we are supposed to do the same thing.
There is just a lot of unimportant information to wade through and someone new to the game does not know what is unimportant. That is part of the game, hiding information. I have had White men give me information that I knew was wrong because I had read enough books. I even had an Irishman ask me why I wanted a computer at home. With these HUGE hard drives I think cloud computing is mostly rubbish. They just want us to use computers in a way that maintains their income stream. I wish that ReactOS operating system was running. I would standardize on free Windows XP and ignore all of the post-XP junk. I just want to do things with computers not not relearn opwerating systems to have a COMPUTING EXPERIENCE.
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My point was that we're well past the era were we could print an operating system's user manual and programming api in the same binding. As for looking up things like von neumann machines, the Internet has plenty of information is freely available. Programming languages have similarly become much more large and complex. Unfortunately, there aren't too many books like K&R that are concise and compact (to be fair though C is a somewhat small language).
Most bookstores don't carry specialized material, if they do they don't stock a lot of it simply because it isn't profitable to sell to just one narrowed interest. Having ever known only one store that retail shop that sort of specialized in carrying used computer books, they're just scarce. Why not start your search at a public library? You probably would've found books in both computing and history that provide an overview of both. If you access their digital materials, you could've easily landed on old academic papers themselves.
I'm not sure about why you've added the commentary about compartmentalizing knowledge (which abstractions and mental models don't necessarily encourage) or the personal anecdote about being given incorrect information, why you hate the cloud (the main benefit being highly redundant,highly distributed not storage space, and highly accessible -- with its own drawbacks of course), or why you'd like to "standardize" on an operating system that has the ultimate goal of providing the capabilities of a 10 year old OS that wasn't much to write home about.
In terms of ease of use (computing as a means to an end), there's been loads of progress on most major operating systems available to consumers. People who want to learn more about computing have access to materials previous generations didn't. They can learn computing principles quickly and code interesting projects without much environment related hassle. A person now has easy access to University material as well. One can simply open up Wikipedia, start with the word "computer", and branch out into any place their interest takes them. Even with all this readily accessible stuff, no one will ever know it all. That's the beauty of computing to me.
I think the key is to stop trying to chase the ultimate reference for everything about a subject as a starting point and just to take sensible plunges. Heck, anyone who wants to learn how to program these days only needs a text editor and a web-browser (Javascript).
