Larry Press
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Since my temperament draws me to groupware, I have read about and taught it, and tried many groupware programs. This has been interesting, but the only groupware that has really affected my work is electronic mail on wide-area networks. My “invisible college,” my colleagues, are not the people in the offices down the corridor, they are people on the Internet, many of whom I have never seen or spoken with.
Finally, new and interesting ideas about documentation.
It is kind of funny, really. Most documentation is written by technicians—not professional writers. And most technicians would include documentation among their top ten complaints regarding the software they use. Physician, heal thyself.
This column describes ideas and suggestions from current literature on software documentation. I hope they will change the way you think about documentation. If you are in the software field, it is almost certain that you will have to write documentation, for either your peers or your users. If you are designing software, you owe it to those you serve to gain an enlightened attitude toward documentation, recognizing the interconnectedness of the software, its documentation, and the help system. Otherwise, you are not a “practical programmer.”
Personal computing: personal computers and the world software market
It may be trite to say that “the world is shrinking,” but it is true nonetheless. Political and technological changes are edging us in the direction of the global village. We have the economic unification of Western Europe, the transition of Eastern Europe to market economies, and free trade agreements and negotiations in the Western hemisphere. Blue jeans and rock and roll music are found throughout the world, we can direct dial to Iceland, and your grandmother may have a FAX machine.
Personal computing: Windows, DOS and the MAC
Direct-manipulation or graphical user interfaces (GUIs) are nearly as old as command-line interfaces.1 At the ACM Conference on The History of Personal Workstations, Doug Ross told of drawing on an oscilloscope screen by using his finger to move a spot of light in 1954. Graphic software has been a bastion of direct manipulation since the 195Os, and Douglas Englebart demonstrated direct manipulation of text to large audiences in the 1960s. The style of contemporary direct-manipulation interfaces evolved largely from prototypes developed at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in the 1970s. The Xerox Star offered a commercial GUI in 1981 (see Figure 1), and several early GUIs, like VisiOn, TopView, and Windows version 1, failed on underpowered PCs. The Macintosh, introduced in 1984, was a major commercial success.
Although GUIs have been used for years, the hardware to support them is expensive, so the vast majority of personal computer users still control their software by typing commands. With the introduction of Windows Version 3, Microsoft hopes to move DOS users away from their command-line interface to a direct-manipulation interface. Let us take a quick look at Windows, then compare it to DOS and the Mac.
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