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sadly, literacy is so bad, that those few of us who can read can make a
lot of money just by reading the manuals noone else can read...
i'll bet most of this list earns a large percentage of their income from
reading stuff :)
in the early days i liked the contrast between the walls of ibm and dec
manuals and john lyons' little 'documention (sic)' that gave us all we
needed to use unix.
now it's all online somewhere on the net - and there exists the real
possibility that we can no longer print all the documentation that is
available electronically - i find that scary.
rick
Bullard, Claude L (Len) wrote:
>When I first arrived at Marshall Space Flight Center to start my career,
>the walls were filled with IBM and Sperry manuals. In my copious spare
>time (really, lots between flights), I read them all. That is how I got
>into this racket. ;-)
>
>len
>
>
>From: Ken North [mailto:kennorth@sbcglobal.net]
>
>
>
>>>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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fn:Rick Marshall
n:Marshall;Rick
email;internet:rjm@zenucom.com
tel;cell:+61 411 287 530
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