Originally Posted by
EEngr
The RS/6000 software used to display maintenance manuals may not have fallen under the scope of an airworthiness directive.
Indeed, but there must be some unfortunate combinations of events where you can end up in a risky state, e.g. instructed to replace A+B+C components and C is omitted from list, then if A+B are replaced but deteriorate due to absence of new C...
This does remind me a bit of modern e-readers. I've heard mixed opinions of these for technical books from "great, I can carry everything around" to "won't touch them because the repagination/formating ruins the content". Device independent output is surprisingly non-trivial.