On Tuesday 13 February 2007 16:29, Miles Fidelman wrote: > FYI: Just for perspective, I'm also old enough to remember designing > control logic for film processors used for in preparing print the > old-fashioned way (you know, half-tone separations, prepared with > screens and cameras) - and, for that matter, laying out the PC boards > with black tape on acetate. Never used TeX or LaTeX, but used enough > runoff and troff (remember those :-) to prefer WYSIWIG editors for > short documents. >
This whole discussion reminds me of my (software product development) department in the 1980's. I had fought for, and succeeded, in getting dumb terminals on everybody's desk connected through to a central Unix system (Xenix from Microsoft - sold by the company I work for in the UK, Logica) running on a PDP 11, where we had introduced version control (SCCS and some modifications) to the software development process. in about 1982 I was in the market for a line printer so that my team could print out their software listings and was pursuaded by the our HP account manager to take a look at their new product - the HP Laserjet. I was sold on the fact that we could get our printouts in A4 form for the first time. As soon as we had taken delivery of this, one of my senior developers set up a series of nroff macros that made it very simple to create a whole range of our companies standard documents in nearly perfect form (company logo etc in header and footer - times fonts in the right size and weight for all the different sections). Most of the rest of the company were still using IBM electronic typewriters - and nobody really understood how our department always produced such good AND STANDARD documentation. Unfortunately the one downside (which today would be handled by svg) was the inability to include anything other than ascii art in embedded diagrams - and eventually PCs on everyone's desk and Microsoft Word took over and by about 1989 this documentation method died. I no longer have anything to do with that area - but I would say today that we still cannot produce documents with the consistency and completeness (proper version control of all documentation, with the version numbers automatically printed in the footer is just one such example) -- Alan Chandler http://www.chandlerfamily.org.uk -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
