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Subject:Re: H/W v S/W difficulty From:Richard Lippincott <rlippinc -at- BEV -dot- ETN -dot- COM> Date:Mon, 14 Nov 1994 09:18:23 EST
Richard Mateosian said:
>As someone pointed out a while back, nobody ever learned Word 6 for Windows
>completely from the manual, because an adequate manual would be too
>difficult to write.
For a team of how many? And what's the limit on pages and volume?
There were twelve of us working on the manuals for the F404 jet engine, the
combined tech manuals were about 6500 pages. (Of course, no one ever learned
F404 maintenance by simply reading the manuals...)
Could 12 tech writers working as a team produce a document that explained
-every- detail of Word 6? I suspect they could. Would it requre 6500
pages? I suspect not.
As for some softwear being non-linear: if it's non-linear, then how does the
program execute? There -has- to be a link between every line and the
instruction that go you there. Sure, there's jumps and loops, but it's still
a series of simple steps, flowing one after another.
Although you make a good point that some types of hardware are simpler than
others, unfortunately -all- my experience was with the complex, incaccessible
stuff.
Rick Lippincott
Eaton Semiconductor
rlippinc -at- bev -dot- etn -dot- com
