[TUHS] Re: Documentation (was On Bloat and the Idea of Small Specialized Tools)

Yeechang Lee: It always seemed to me that ISO standards were written to be equally incomprehensible in all languages, substituting terms like Protocol Data Unit (PDU) for familiar ones like Packet. In the early Internet, where there wasn't ANY money to be made in antisocial conduct, it was easier to justify sentiments like "Rough consensus and working code" and "be liberal in what you accept". Lest ye forget, "industry standards" were once limited to things like magnetic patterns on half-inch tape and the serial transmission of bits, and at the LOWEST of levels. Reading a tape written on another vendor's system wasn't easy when I got started in the early 80's; In addition to ASCII and EBCDIC, there were still systems with vendor-specific 6-bit character sets, never mind punched cards. I remember going on a campus tour in the late 70's where there was an ASCII terminal hooked up to some system that had BASIC (the standard at the time was ANSI "Minimal BASIC"; a full(er) standard took long enough that it was dead on arrival), but instead of "RETURN" required typing CTRL/C (defined in ASCII as End Of Text) to enter a line! In that context, getting ANYTHING working across vendors was a victory, and having one system refuse to speak to another because of some small detail in what one of them considered reasonable (or not) was asking for trouble. The times and stakes today are distinctly different.