[OpenAFS] Happy Holidays -- Another year in the life of OpenAFS

[David Boyes]

________________________________________
From: openafs-info-admin@openafs.org [openafs-info-admin@openafs.org] On Be=
half Of Ted Creedon [tcreedon@easystreet.net]
Sent: Friday, December 23, 2011 12:50 AM
Cc: OpenAFS-Info
Subject: Re: [OpenAFS] Happy Holidays -- Another year in the life of OpenAF=
S

What were the original doc tools?

Love to look at them.

The original IBM doc tools used a package called Bookmaster that IBM Inform=
ation Design created for writing and maintaining all kinds of documents. It=
 was a highly structured set of markup tags that overlaid SCRIPT (later kno=
wn as DCF - Document Composition Facility), one of the earliest text for ma=
tters available. DCF could produce nice output on a number of different dev=
ices, including text-only, Postscript, the input language for high-performa=
nce Xerox and Kodak printers, etc. It supported everything from slides to l=
etters to technical manuals, and was very well documented itself - much bet=
ter than Docbook is. Everyone from secretaries to senior execs used it - it=
 had to be easy to learn and use.

DCF ate flat text files from many sources, and add-ons could assemble and m=
anage revision control and markup on very large (10,000 pages or more) coll=
ections of technical documentation, and for many years was the tool that pr=
oduced every document IBM published or circulated. Some parts of IBM still =
use it. There is still a Gosling Emacs mode that understands the tags, and =
I still maintain LECS and XEDIT syntax files for it.

It was replaced in the late 1990s with FrameMaker for formal docs, and gene=
ral WP software for letters, etc. IMHO, a huge step backward.