Seattle STC Conference -- 1984!

[Walt Tucker <walt_tucker -at- MENTORG -dot- COM>]

After attending the most recent Seattle STC conference, the proceedings
for the last STC conference to be held in Seattle (1984) happened to catch my
eye.  Those proceedings have been sitting on my shelf for years!

For those of us old farts who were fortunate to be technical writing at
that time, we tend to forget how archaic things really were until we browse
though topics that were considered "state of the art" at the time.
(Note that, for the 1984 conference, most papers were submitted and based
on work done in later 1982 and 1983).  For you young pups, let this be a
lesson to you how hard life was back then.

Harken back then, to a time when:

  -- Many technical writers, especially at large companies with
     the dollars to spend on computer equipment had, in the last few years
     made the transition to "writing electronically".
     But, writers at smaller companies who couldn't affort the $3000
     for the newly-released IBM PC or additional dollars for a more
     sophisticated system, were still doing work on typewriters.
     Typesetting and pasteup were a traditional part of the production
     process.

     For older writers, the the world and the profession was changing
     rapidly and the big question was "Could they learn how to use
     the new computer equipment and learn enough computer skills to
     stay employable in the rapidly changing market?"

  -- Virtually all computer equipment we had was based on an 80 character
     screen.  ASCII terminals connecting to a mainframe were common, but
     the "personal computer", especially as a result of the introduction
     of the IBM PC in 1982, was starting to make big in-roads.   Most
     people had yet to see a windowed display; the
     the Apple MacIntosh had just been released (after most papers
     were written) and it was the big buzz, but most writers had
     yet to see one.  And, who had yet heard of a mouse (except,
     perhaps for a few Autocad users that had used them to digitize
     schematics)?

  -- Comparisons of state-of-the art word processing systems, such
     as WordStar, Perfect Writer, ScriptSit were big STC topics.  Should
     I use a word processing system?  If so, which one should I convince
     my company to buy?  Could they afford a sophisticated and
     expensive word processing system such as a WANG (the title of
     one paper was "Planning and Implementing the Right Word Processing
     System")?  Virtually no one had yet seen a WYSIWYG editor, and "Desk Top
     Publishing" was still a catch phrase about two years in the future.

     Some papers based comparisons of word processing programs on how
     many keystrokes it took to do specific functions, and one paper
     offered a method to write your own word processing program (in BASIC,
     no less).

     Another paper promoted the advantages of a computer networks for
     writers.  Yet another discussed how to move the editing function
     online (items such as annotations and so on).  Radical stuff!

  -- Some forward-thinkers were talking about moving documentation online,
     and there were even papers about online help!  Most of these systems
     were based on an 80 character screen (remember, no icons yet,
     window manager, or even a mouse).  Help was typically accessed through
     a "help" key on the keyboard or a series of menu items.  You would
     enter a help program and be presented with six or seven choices and
     a prompt that said "What is you selection number?".  You would then
     work through the menus until you got to the appropriate information.
     It is interesting to note, though, that some of the basic tenents of
     online information (the online book, the online tutorial, online help
     broken into tasks and so on) were still there and are still relevant
     today.  Most people didn't know what hyperlinking meant and, except
     in labs, there were no real commercial examples.

  -- Whereas writers were going electronic, most illustrators were still based
     in the pen and ink world.  One paper presented a state-of-the art system
     for creating graphics online, with no less than five separate peices
     of hardware (computer and screen, printer, plotter, graphics tablet,
     and disk drive).

  -- IBM was well-represented at the conference.  Our old staple, William
     Horton even presented a couple of papers (he worked for Exxon at
     the time).  Future STC officers Elizibeth Babcock and William
     Grice also presented.

-- Walt Tucker
   Mentor Graphics Corp.

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