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Re: The Origins of Techwriting (WAS:Re: Techwr-1 polls)
Subject:Re: The Origins of Techwriting (WAS:Re: Techwr-1 polls) From:<Robert -dot- Campbell -at- arm -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Tue, 14 Nov 2000 11:06:03 +0000
Remember the days when "cut and paste" actually involved getting your
fingers
sticky or when drafting tables were actually used for drafting? (If you do
you're older than I am ;), I think I read about it in a book somewhere....)
Ah, yes - those joyful days of leaving home at 6am, driving a couple of
hours to spend the day crawling over a coal conveyor or a locomotive or a
helicopter, wearing a hard hat, and with illustrator in tow with a camera.
Occasionally, it was necessary to dismantle something and scrawl the
procedure in a notebook (the paper type...) or, if the component fitted in
the car, take it back to work to dismantle at my leisure. The validation
process of my procedures involved putting the thing back together again
without too many leftover bits, and getting it working again. The company I
was at (in the late 80s) refused to let the TWs do their own tying/DTP, so
everything was hand-written, typeset and eventually pasted up on laymark
sheets. The job is a lot cleaner these days, but I sometimes get a twinge
of nostalgia for the semi-adventure of the old days...
Robert Campbell
Technical Author
ARM Limited
110 Fulbourn Road
Cherry Hinton
Cambridge
CB1 9NJ
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