On 04/03/2021 20:07, T i m wrote:
On Thu, 4 Mar 2021 00:53:26 +0000, John Rumm
wrote:

snip cool stuff

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.

Even to putting a period at the end of an email address if it happens
at the end of a sentence. ;-(

Or a mate, keen to get on with the first 'Teach yourself MSDOS'
magazine where it told readers to insert the floppy disk, and type

a:run me

The file was of course run_me(.bat) so the 'lesson' fell at the first
hurdle. ;-(

Yup, the first doc I did that broke tech pubs was a CORAL 66 coding
standard. Just trying to get them to set out code examples in a non
proportional font, and to understand that the indentation of our
"paragraphs" really did need to be *exactly* as it was shown, even
though it was not "proper typographic layout", and no, all those
semi-colons were not a mistake!

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!

Bless. ;-)

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!

Quite.

Although they did whinge that we had used the wrong sized font on our
docs, until we got out a ruler and demonstrated that ours was actually
the 12pt they specified, and theirs was only 11 because their printer
was scaling incorrectly!

I think it's a shame and probably held back many less progressive
British companies in the world market (who may have only survived as
long as they had because if their size and how tightly they were
imbedded with MOD contracts)?

Well in this particular case, but they had several things in their
favour. Firstly their hardware (i.e. the radio kit) was very good kit
that was widely deployed and trusted. Secondly the competition in many
cases made the less progressive British lot look positively advanced[1],
and lastly they did (kind of) have a working example of the complete
system that the customer wanted to buy.

[1] A certain Italian maker of HF radios springs to mind. They had an
interface spec to write their radio management software against. It was
not complicated - a command response protocol using ARINC 429 serial
bus. Two 32 command words, and two 32 bit responses. The protocol
sequence is: we send command word 1, you reply with status word 1, we
send command word 2, you reply with status word 2. Here is the bit
format of all the words, and here is your ARINC bus address. Does that
sound difficult?

So there implementation: On power up, listen to the bus until you hear a
command word, assume that is for you and adopt the destination address
on it, and assume that is yours from now on. Wait for command word 1 and
do nothing. Wait for command word 2 and reply with status words 1 and 2
in sequence.

So the result was, after powered up it would grab the address for some
other peripheral, misinterpret the contents of a message not intended
for it, and then trample over the actual target devices responses, while
ignoring any we wanted it to receive!

We did highlight that this did not match the spec, and that they had a
fixed price contract to deliver to that spec. Could they please fix the
software ASAP? Apparently, no can do. It's the middle of summer and the
whole factory shuts down for a 6 weeks. Then after that they
traditionally go on strike for another month or so while the weather is
still good!

(in the end we had to "accommodate" it at the controller end - by making
sure that the first message sent on that bus was a HF radio one, so it
got the right address, and use a different protocol from all the other
devices!)

--
Cheers,

John.

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