STC Eastern Ontario Blog

Thanks to everyone who came out last night for the February program event. The acoustics in the room sucked because of an overhead industrial ventilation fan, but that didn’t seem to hamper discussion too much.

It was great to hear stories from people who have been in the field a long time, though it makes me a little melancholy as well when I think of how much I’ve missed out on. I’m fairly newly-come to the world of technical writing, though not to technical writing itself. Up until my current job, I’d written in a complete silo, with the writing just comprising a part of my job duties (e.g. I was a computer operator who wrote or I was a software tester who wrote). I wish I’d known back when I was getting my post-secondary education in the early 80s that technical writing was a career choice. But in Atlantic Canada, technical writing wasn’t then and still isn’t now a highly visible profession.

Listening to the panelists last night, I realized that, while I may not have been a part of the technical writing world at that time, I was getting my education and writing technical documentation during that time so I have many of the same memories of tools and technologies used. My high school got their first microcomputer, which only the most uber of the ubergeeks got to touch, at the end of my final year. At the end of my first course of studies at college in 1982/83, we were introduced to the marvels of word processors but never got to use them—an electric typewriter was the closest we got to “high tech”. (Even now, I still love the solid thunk sound of an IBM Selectric typewriter typeball in action. No picking apart jammed typebars. It was beautiful.) During my second course of studies at college in 1983/85, we got to spend a couple of hours in a brand new, spiffy TRS-80 lab before going back to the usual HP3000 minicomputer programming we were learning. We were taught that punched cards were a thing of the past and yet I had to use them in my first several jobs after school.

My first manual, which was written when I was working as a computer operator in 1986, was written on a Digital VAX 11/785 using what was at the time IMO a pretty sweet word processing program called MASS-11—the program offered limited text formatting choices (underlining and bolding were pretty much your only options) but it churned out fairly nice looking documents, complete with tables of contents. My father found a draft copy of that manual (minus the table of contents, which was a separate file in MASS-11) in the attic a couple of years ago and sent it to me. The production version would have been printed on white, clean edge 8.5 X 11 paper but the draft version was printed on the back side of lined 8.5 X 14.75 fanfold computer paper. The writing still holds up pretty well, though.