When I first arrived at Marshall Space Flight Center to start my career,
the walls were filled with IBM and Sperry manuals. In my copious spare
time (really, lots between flights), I read them all. That is how I got
into this racket. ;-)
len
From: Ken North [mailto:]
>> I was throwing away a DEC VAX Fortran manual last week and stopped to
>> think
that once upon a time in my career, almost everything an application
programming engineer had to know to create product was in two 1/2 inch
bound notebooks.
It depended on whose computers you were using, and whether you were a
systems programmer or application programmer.
DEC's documentation was very sparse during the PDP-11 era. By the VAX
era, DEC had more software and more manuals, but still less than IBM
mainframe documentation. A full set of System 360 manuals would fill a
rack about 4 feet wide. Because they were hard to come by, we'd put our
names on the spine, put them on tethers, or lock them in cabinets.
Years after the Apollo program, I called a friend's office to see if he
wanted to play tennis during my upcoming trip to Silicon Valley. Someone
else answered the phone and offered to take a message. When she heard my
name, she asked whether I'd ever developed software for Goddard Space
Flight Center. When I said yes, she said "I inherited your set of IBM
manuals after you left."
