I have learned unix with sunOs in 1990. Man pages were excellent. The first command I learned was "man man". There was a paper version of the man pages available in the computer room (among many other sun documentations). I became pissed by man pages only when I switched to linux. At that time, I have discovered the crypt(3) command by looking at the index of man pages. One week later, I had cracked 10% of passwords of the school (creating my own dictionary).
I remember getting new Sun workstations at that time and part of the fun of getting new Suns was taking the boxes of printed documentation that came with them and slotting them into the supplied ring folders.
Later on they would ship the Adobe red/blue/green PostScript books with OpenWindows.
The docset was large, but it was not as large as a VAX.
I had to learn VMS in a hurry in the last two months of 1986. I had the full binder set on a shelf in my toilet (Cambridge, UK). You could not have put a VAX in there :)
