Hi,
My early days were spent in the electronics industry. I can remember receiving 3 pallets
of data books from National Semiconductor. This happened every year. The Internet and the
availability of on line documentation put a stop to that. It was a revolution.
On 2 Jun 2024, at 12:31 PM, Will Senn
<will.senn(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Today, as I was digging more into nroff/troff and such, and bemoaning the lack of brevity
of modern text. I got to thinking about the old days and what might have gone wrong with
book production that got us where we are today.
First, I wanna ask, tongue in cheek, sort of... As the inventors and early pioneers in
the area of moving from typesetters to print on demand... do you feel a bit like the
Manhattan project - did you maybe put too much power into the hands of folks who probably
shouldn't have that power?
But seriously, I know the period of time where we went from hot metal typesetting to the
digital era was an eyeblink in history but do y'all recall how it went down? Were you
surprised when folks settled on word processors in favor of markup? Do you think
we've progressed in the area of ease of creating documentation and printing it making
it viewable and accurate since 1980?
I didn't specifically mention unix, but unix history is forever bound to the
evolution of documents and printing, so I figure it's fair game for TUHS and
isn't yet COFF :).
Later,
Will
Peter Yardley
peter.martin.yardley(a)gmail.com