That PDF document was produced by some historical interviewers, not Symbolics. Your comment roundly criticizes Symbolics for someone else's work. Only in the words it contains does it have anything to do with Symbolics documentation!
Unable to discover the affiliation of its authors (not stated in the document itself), I can't tell where it did come from -- although it is hosted by several sites around the world, not just MIT. It shows internal evidence of font character code corruption, typical in the 2001 era of moving a document from one kind of system to another, or even just trying to change font-set. Note the prevalence of capital U's where an apostrophe belongs, and the clipped text in the second "competitive wheel" diagram. In fact, the diagrams show all the signs of being pasted in from an incompatible system: that wheel diagram is no longer circular, and the egregious box-and-pointer diagrams show the character misplacement typically exacerbated by PDF encoding.
None of that would have issued from Symbolics Press.
I may be a little defensive on the issue of paying attention to docs -- why else would I make a thoughtful response to a down-voted comment from someone with a history of them? At Symbolics, I was pleased that my technical writer colleagues shared the same title of MTS as us developers. I led the small team which developed Symbolics' document development system Concordia, and its document formatter -- which btw was contemporary with TeX and drew upon Knuth's published paragraph and equation layout algorithms. Also I personally inspected every pixel of every character (and all the pixels between) in every font used in Symbolics documentation. In a side-by-side comparison, Symbolics docs would look superior to something from 1986 TeX. One might see how even Prof. Knuth himself wished that Computer Modern had had the attentions of a professional font designer.
Finally, the paper itself explained that such in-house efforts were all of a piece with the rest of the company's engineering ethos.
Leaving aside ad hominem remarks... I do not criticize Symbolics at all, or the documentation it (or you) produced. I do criticize the authors; either they were Lisp apologists themselves, or allowed themselves to be misled by Lisp apologists.
And, they kerned badly. I leave to you which was the greater offense.
Unable to discover the affiliation of its authors (not stated in the document itself), I can't tell where it did come from -- although it is hosted by several sites around the world, not just MIT. It shows internal evidence of font character code corruption, typical in the 2001 era of moving a document from one kind of system to another, or even just trying to change font-set. Note the prevalence of capital U's where an apostrophe belongs, and the clipped text in the second "competitive wheel" diagram. In fact, the diagrams show all the signs of being pasted in from an incompatible system: that wheel diagram is no longer circular, and the egregious box-and-pointer diagrams show the character misplacement typically exacerbated by PDF encoding.
None of that would have issued from Symbolics Press.
I may be a little defensive on the issue of paying attention to docs -- why else would I make a thoughtful response to a down-voted comment from someone with a history of them? At Symbolics, I was pleased that my technical writer colleagues shared the same title of MTS as us developers. I led the small team which developed Symbolics' document development system Concordia, and its document formatter -- which btw was contemporary with TeX and drew upon Knuth's published paragraph and equation layout algorithms. Also I personally inspected every pixel of every character (and all the pixels between) in every font used in Symbolics documentation. In a side-by-side comparison, Symbolics docs would look superior to something from 1986 TeX. One might see how even Prof. Knuth himself wished that Computer Modern had had the attentions of a professional font designer.
Finally, the paper itself explained that such in-house efforts were all of a piece with the rest of the company's engineering ethos.