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Re: Editing .pdfs - Continued

Subject: Re: Editing .pdfs - Continued
From: Dick Margulis <margulis -at- fiam -dot- net>
To: Al Geist <al -dot- geist -at- geistassociates -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 12 Feb 2004 21:16:00 -0500

Al,

I not only remember (and used) the Selectric Composer; I remember when it wasn't even a glimmer in IBM's eye. But what I do NOT remember is pencil and yellow legal pads. There is not now, nor has there ever been, a pool typist who could have deciphered my chicken scratching. Hell, I can't even read it most of the time. I learned to type early. An Olivetti Lettera 22 and Eaton's Corrasable Bond got me through high school and college, and a Royal 55 and canary sulfite got me through my first writing job. That was the medium of choice for rough drafts at J. Walter Thompson.

Meanwhile, IBM's manuals were still being made up on a B-2 typewriter, and later a Selectric typewriter. Typeset manuals came years later.

Dick

Al Geist wrote:


WOW!!! You have been around a long time. I bet you even remember PMT's and the old IBM Composer...wonderful machine for justifying text. You could do it faster using a chisel on a block of marble. I agree, pages created in the "old" days may have looked bland, but they were packed full of content. (I wrote MILSPECs and MILStds back in the old days and font fiddling consisted of Bold (double strike) or normal (single strike). It's a lot harder today to focus on good content when everyone from the SME to the Marketing Guy wants something that speaks "leading edge technology," even if the subject matter is a composting toilet.

Al

Gene Kim-Eng wrote:

Nostalgia time! We used to write up our drafts on
ruled paper with #2 pencils, create our illustrations
on a drafting board, send them all off to the secretarial
pool to be typed and then out for layout, printing and binding. Then came "Technical Publications," with editors,
illustrators, typesetters and later desktop publishers.





References:
RE: Re: Editing .pdfs - Continued: From: Gene Kim-Eng
Re: Editing .pdfs - Continued: From: Al Geist

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