On 03/03/2021 22:22, T i m wrote:

[1] His point was that the people in the typing pool were paid to be
there and were good at producing documents to the Co std. This was in
comparison with those managers who preferred to spend more time doing
it themselves and making all sorts of mistakes whilst at it.

Yeah, that can work both ways though...

I had a software development contract in the mid to late 90's at
GEC/Marconi's air radio group. They had a traditional tech pubs
department armed with Data Recall Diamond 7 word processors and nice
daisy wheel printers. To get any document published, you gave a copy to
them, and they typed it up and issued it - keeping a formal record copy
in their filing cabinets, and possibly a copy on floppy disk. This
process was created in an age where most documentation would be produced
by the engineers by hand.

Alas they really had no clue about software - their idea of
configuration control was to do it the same was as they did paper
documents, they would keep a master copy of the ROMs for the various
bits of kit in a cupboard, and could arrange for copies to be sent to
production when required. That meant if you wanted the source code to
be able to rebuild or alter something in the future, the best you would
likely get form tech pubs would be a blank stare. It was pot luck if you
could find the original engineer, and hope their development system
still existed, and they still had a readable floppy with code on it!

So when we started (big project - Merlin Helicopter comms sub system) a
big influx of software people, this was also the first time that all the
engineers had PCs and their own word processors. This created a certain
amount of tension within the tech pubs traditionalists. The original
plan was we could word process our own documents and give them to tech
pubs. They would print them out, then get the typing pool to rekey into
their systems and issue the draft doc. Engineering could review and
correct it, and send it back and fourth until it was "correct" and then
passed by QA, and could be issued.

Needless to say the whole process very quickly fell about in a heap when
presented with long technical docs - and the typists did not appreciate
that exact layout and choice of character really did matter on software
stuff. No amount of sending stuff back with comments could get something
even close to what you needed.

After much argument, they agreed that we could do the body of the
document ourselves, but they would produce the three front pages to the
corporate standard and affix them!

Needless to say we could do a much more faithful implementation of their
corporate document standard with Wordperfect and feeding PostScript to a
HP LaserJet IV, than they could on their dedicated word processors!


--
Cheers,

John.

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