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Subject:Re: old school From:"Damien Braniff" <Damien -dot- Braniff -at- asg -dot- com> To:<techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Wed, 21 May 2008 10:46:55 +0100
Most of the writers here in the UK are (or at least were) moved into
TWing from engineering, programming etc when it was discovered they
could write! I'm one of the few my age (not that old!!) who went
straight into the profession.
When I started the tools were pencils with the text handed over to
typists to set out for printing. Professional illustrators provided the
graphics and then came the real art - cut 'n' stick!!
The first package we had was Samna (anyone remember that?), a precursor
of AmiPro that had a permanent toolbar at the top of the screen that
eventually burned through! Then came Word Perfect for DOS (best!),
Venture, Word, AmiPro and finally Frame.
At university one of the lecturers worked on Baby (first computer built
in Manchester) and he said that only any computer does is compare
patterns and answer Y/N - just does it fast! To show how it WAS done he
had an exercise where we programmed, in hex, using swithches!
We started programming in Algol then moved to Pascal but as one of the
visiting profs was one of the Algol designers we kept using it too via
punched cards which ran over night - made you good at getting the syntax
right when you'd to wait 24 hrs for a re-run!
Damien Braniff
Sr. Technical Writer
damienb -at- asg -dot- com
Waterfront Plaza
8, Lagan bank Road
Belfast, N. Ireland BT1 3LR
Tel: +44 (0) 28.9072.3124
Fax: +44 (0) 28.9072.3324
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