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Subject:Re: One publication or two? From:Matt Ion <mion -at- NEXTLEVEL -dot- COM> Date:Wed, 27 Sep 1995 19:47:52 PDT
On Tue, 26 Sep 1995 12:04:21 -0400 you wrote:
>> At 19:51 24/09/95 PDT, Matt Ion wrote:
>> >I'm afraid the size of the manual doesn't have much to do with it. I worked
>> >for a few months at IBM as a TSA when Warp was released last year.
>....
>> Of course, I take your point, the OS/2 Manual is well done.
>That's an interesting change. The OS/2 2.1 manual was what made me
>decide I could be a technical writer. I *knew* I could write better
>than that! I suspect a lot of the phone calls Matt got were from
>people who upgraded, and expected equally bad documentation.
You think 2.1's manual was bad, get ahold of a copy of 2.0's "documentation"
(take along a magnifying glass just to find it).
Actually, the reason I and a number of others were hired on a temporary
on-contract basis was because of the demand created by the number of NEW users
to Warp. Keep in mind that very few computer users had ever (at the time)
installed anything on the level of an operating system - 90% of all PCs out
there came with DOS/Windows pre-installed. It's quite a different world than
installing a word processor, which can be done with little more instruction
than "Insert disk in drive A:, type A:SETUP.EXE"
I think most of those upgrading from 2.1 had already been through the same
kinds of problems and worked them out installing that, the one exception
possibly being those who had received the "OS/2 for Windows" freebie CD-ROM,
which came with almost NO printed documentation (other than how to create
install boot diskettes from the CD).
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