[DaveFlater]

DEC's documentation for VAX/VMS and related apps. The great orange/gray wall of heavy-duty binders. What wowed me: whatever I needed to know, it was in there, I could find it, and the software behaved as the documentation said.

[hazelnut-tree]

Although I have not read DEC's (Digital Equipment Corporation) documentation, but I've come across a 1990 book that mentions DEC's approach to documentation:

> Digital Equipment Corporation noted in their 1983 internal documentation guidelines that user documentation should be written first — not last as is traditionally done — because the user documentation is an excellent way to debug the design of a system or a program. “If a writer finds it difficult to document a system, the problem is probably the system not the writer. Holes in design, obscure constructions, and apparent contradictions become starkly visible in the documentation.”

(From book: Writing better computer user documentation, 1990)