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No matter what IBM does, it smells like FORTRAN. Jokes aside. Anyone knows what software did they use back in the days to write such beautiful manuals with key
by ruslan 5y ago
No matter what IBM does, it smells like FORTRAN.
Jokes aside. Anyone knows what software did they use back in the days to write such beautiful manuals with keycaps and other icons ? Was it TeX, troff or anything alike ? I have old Atari manuals printed on thick glossy paper, they look quite similar and are pretty cool to read and keep in hands.
- boygobbo 5y agoThis looks very similar to me to the mainframe manuals I am familiar with from this time which were written using SCRIPT/VS as the printer control language & GML (which begat SGML) as the document markup language (implemented as SCRIPT/VS macros). There was also SCRIPT/PC for DOS but that was very limited by comparison and a pain to use so I doubt they used that. (SCRIPT/VS is quite like Troff - they share a common ancestor in RUNOFF.)
- ruslan 5y agoThanks for sharing. Googling for "SCRIPT/VS" gives the only link pointing to somewhere in the middle of IBM's z/OS manual. Must be a lost alien technology by now.
- boygobbo 5y agoThere's a Wikipedia page[1] which covers the general background and a copy of the SCRIPT/VS Text Programmer's Guide[2] (which was my bible back in the day) on archive.org, which should give you a pretty good overview. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup) [2] https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibm370DCFSpositionFacilitySCRIPTVSTextProgrammersG_17539665 https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ibm370DCFSpositionFaci...