Post by Sam PlusnetPost by SilvanoPost by Peter MoylanIn 2001 it jumped the shark
This must be Australian.
Post by Peter MoylanI'm not surprised by the prose quality. These magazines were aimed at a
mixture of engineers, technicians, and hobbyists. The writers were what
we now call technical writers, an occupation that requires a mixture of
technical know-how and a high level of writing skill. It's often said
that we rude mechanicals are deficient in communication ability, but
that's an over-generalisation that's not supported by the evidence.
My professional experience as a translator, among other things, of
operating instructions tells me that the quality of the originals
improves by a factor of x (I'll leave it to you* to define x) when a
technical writer modifies the instructions written by an engineer or the
holder of a patent.
The problem we always found was that you needed an engineer who designed
the system to be able to create the test specs and user documentation.
I had the experience, a time or two, of deciding to change the program
to make it easier to document. (How someone might mis-read a prompt
is not always obvious to the programmer, for instance.)
so that the documentation
This week, a ran into a case where a program change was not well-
documented. I needed to login to a site to update the expiration
date of my credit card. I probably last logged in five years ago,
giving them the 01/25 expiration. My login was refused. After
futzing around with re-tries, I went to Change the Password.
There, I learned that their Password NOW needs 8+ charaters and
some variation in characcters -- so my 7-character password was
invalid (and probably never even tested, "too short"). I ran into
the same problem on some other account in recent years; possibly,
they gave some better clue what was going on, but maybe not.
Post by Sam PlusnetHowever, anyone who was so close to the material tended to ignore holes
and errors - because you _knew_ what it was supposed to say.
We would try to ask someone who was technically literate, but unfamiliar
with the system, to read through it.
The problem with that was they were too busy with their own projects to
do a good job of it.
The Pitt Computer Center in the 1970s put out good documentation.
They especially hired literate work-study students for re-writes. And
their systems people had to take occasional turns on the Help Desks
in the campus labs. End of the 1970s saw the transition from cards
and keypunch machines to terminals.
--
Rich Ulrich