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>> I was throwing away a DEC VAX Fortran manual last week and stopped to think
that once upon a time in my career, almost everything an
application programming engineer had to know to create product was in two 1/2
inch bound notebooks.
It depended on whose computers you were using, and whether you were a systems
programmer or application programmer.
DEC's documentation was very sparse during the PDP-11 era. By the VAX era, DEC
had more software and more manuals, but still less than IBM mainframe
documentation. A full set of System 360 manuals would fill a rack about 4 feet
wide. Because they were hard to come by, we'd put our names on the spine, put
them on tethers, or lock them in cabinets.
Years after the Apollo program, I called a friend's office to see if he wanted
to play tennis during my upcoming trip to Silicon Valley. Someone else answered
the phone and offered to take a message. When she heard my name, she asked
whether I'd ever developed software for Goddard Space Flight Center. When I said
yes, she said "I inherited your set of IBM manuals after you left."
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