Reading about the augmented future of technical communication triggered a memory. Many years ago, when I worked at Computer Associates, they produced a product called CA-7/OLC. (I think that was the abbreviation.) It was an enhancement to their CA-7 software, which is still used for scheduling jobs on big old mainframe computers. The interface for CA-7 was, of course, the good old green screen – green text on a black background. The software came on – are you ready, kiddies – magnetic tapes. CA-7/OLC was different. The demo included a large piece of hardware that played a 12-inch laserdisk. (Gee, I forget the names of all the parts after all these years.) The product was on a PC using 3.5-inch diskettes, and the laserdisk had some additional magic not possible on the PC back then. When you ran the program, you saw the usual green-screen interface. Slightly boring, with a…
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And I really stretched myself thin. Despite the fact that I can prepare a blog post in advance and set it to post itself at a particular time – I didn’t use that fine service. Life has been way too hectic lately. I made a pledge to write a post about women in technology on March 24th, the day chosen for Ada Lovelace Day, and I wanted to keep that promise. I admired the initiative, and I felt it was an important thing to do. As of this writing, I have. Twice. This is my third Ada Lovelace post. The first post was for the AccessAbility SIG of STC where I wrote about four women in (accessible) technology. Frankly, I couldn’t make up my minda dn choose just one! I wrote about three women who coincidentally are all connected to the W3C – Judy Brewer, Wendy Chisholm, and Shawn Henry…
1 CommentI am a fan of Creature Discomforts! I just discovered these delightful creations from Aardman Animations while writing for another blog. As I wrote in that blog entry, these animations were made to help re-brand a UK charity called Leonard Cheshire Disability. This type of communication appeals to me immensely. I admire the animation work of Aardman Animations and love watching their stories unfold. At the same time, in this case, I am also “educated” about disabilities. Mary Poppins’ rule about “a spoonful of sugar” helping the medicine go down frequently applies to education – and I could add: technical communication. How to get a difficult, serious, sensitive message across in the best possible way? That is a task that many technical communicators face every day. Seeing a presentation like this is a tremendous inspiration, although the effort behind clay or stop-motion animation is so huge that it is definitely…
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