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Subject:Impact of information explosion From:Richard Mateosian <srm -at- C2 -dot- ORG> Date:Tue, 19 Mar 1996 22:49:20 -0800
>The semiconductor industry, has reached the point where paper can
>no longer do the job. The data books that are the primary vehicle
>of communication between design engineer and customer are only small
>snapshots of the data a customer will need.
This is certainly true, but it's even more pronounced for the big software
packages -- FrameMaker, Word, and so forth. I didn't get much agreement
about a year ago when I said that paper software manuals are on the way out,
but I bet more people would agree now.
>I am looking at a picture of a semiconductor memory register. It shows
>the register names and beginning and ending offset addresses. This
>graphic could almost certainly have been automatically generated
>straight out of a product design database.
I did a project about ten years ago that involved pulling parts of the
information about a graphics-oriented microprocessor out of design source
files. I wrote some grep and ed commands and some awk scripts. The output
went into the tbl preprocessor, then to troff. It may have been the world's
first programmer reference manual that used a makefile. ...RM
Richard Mateosian Freelance Technical Writer
srm -at- c2 -dot- org Copyright 1996 Review Editor, IEEE Micro http://www.c2.org/~srm/ All rights reserved President, Berkeley STC
