[Info-vax] Radical command line suggestion

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2015-03-20 15:42:27 +0000, Bill Gunshannon said:

> What about some of the experts here colaborating on something like this 
> for VMS?...

Right idea, but several generations back in the presentation and 
maintenance.  With images and diagrams yes, but — being printed — with 
no multimedia.  Traditional printed books also suffer from the delays 
inherent in the publication and release cycle.   Getting a new version 
of a book out — having a little familiarity with the topic — is slow.  
Much slower than pressing a "publish" button.

Even when TIMA article access was limited to the AskQ web interface 
that some folks here have probably seen, the TIMA article approach was 
— and all multimedia limitations aside — much more able to add and 
update contents.   Quickly.   Easily.  There was a whole lot more to 
TIMA behind the scenes.  Much more than was ever visible to folks 
outside of DEC.

In more recent years, organizations are now presenting content from 
TIMA-like systems directly to users, either via the web or via 
integrated support articles and data within the various tools and 
clients.

For a roughly-analogous example of presenting the content of many small 
articles that see various updates, HP was offering their QuickSpecs 
documentation via Evernote 
<http://h71069.www7.hp.com/quickspecs/pdfs/Quickspecs_Evernote_User_Guide.pdf>, 
for instance.

As for content, I've put ~1900 articles online, many of which are 
related to OpenVMS.    Particularly as the support activity increases, 
the VSI folks will inherently be accumulating recipes and articles.  
These articles will be for internal use, at least initially.  What they 
decide to do with that text and what tools they might decide to create 
and/or use, we shall see.

VMS folks also aren't usually accustomed to seeing near-live updates 
arriving.  Not anywhere near as often as the updates could or probably 
eventually should, for that matter.




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