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Subject:RE: The Burden of Screen Captures From:"Mike O." <obie1121 -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Fri, 22 Nov 2002 14:21:27 -0800 (PST)
Mike Bradley wrote:
> Caution, stack about to blow ...
There's no substitute for reading the original post, which also
said:
>> Mostly it was just a common-sense restatement of
>> principles other tech writers were already practicing.
>> MS didn't invent task-oriented docs,
> All these were in Silicon Valley...I doubt you can
> say the computer industry here isn't in the mainstream.
By mainstream I meant mass market. Silicon Valley was in the
vanguard at the time, not in the mainstream at all. In my
opinion, the "mainstream" began when large numbers of people
started getting their very first computer under the Christmas
tree, with a crateful of user manuals. Then you started to see
armies of English majors offering themselves as tech writers,
with all kinds of theories about how user documention should be
written (I say this as a veteran of that army).
> Don't tell me it took a decade for the rest of the
> country to catch on to what we were doing.
It did. Most white-collar workers hadn't even used a mouse or a
GUI until 1991-2, which IIRC was when Windows 3.1 started
penetrating the workplace. I used to get a fair amount of work
reworking menu-driven user manuals into task-oriented help
systems.
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