stephen waters wrote:Alan Kirk wrote:There was one; it was released in January 2005. I can send you a copy of the release notes if you like, for this was back in the days when there
were release notes.
I checked our old "version update" and have the notes on 8.3 ( headed "Interim release") before they released the triumph that was Dynamic slices in version 8.4.
Hey, those babies had dynamic
columns too, remember!
(The fact that they were about as stable as an ISB after a night of doing vodka shot competitions with Boris Yeltsin's ghost is neither here nor there.)
stephen waters wrote:We must have omitted the smaller point releases (fix packs, hot fixes, service packs, service releases or whatever they were calling them that quarter).
A tradition that IBM proudly continues with Fix Central, er, hot fix, er, what's this one called and which random place do you get it from this week?
stephen waters wrote:Sorry, I am getting too old and my brain is overstretched by version numbers and revised licensing names and roles.
I know that feeling.
stephen waters wrote:Maybe I should go back to the old days when they released a new version of DOS every couple of years and you could skip every other one because the even numbered releases were crap...
I thought that was the pre-Abrams
Star Trek films, but then I remembered that those were the odd numbered releases.
stephen waters wrote:Having said that, I am surprised to find you pining for the days of Applix (non) documentation. i remember battling to persuade them to compile a pdf manual\release notes form the on-line html stuff.
Roger that, but at least they did finally start doing it, kinda sorta. I was just grateful when they standardised on PDFs and stopped sending out release documentation in a melange of .pdfs, Word documents and Excel sheets, each in a different format to the preceding release. Ah, those were(n't) the days.
stephen waters wrote:The stuff we get from IBM tends to be much more thorough, including release notes.
Weeeellll... yes and no. They release the New Features Guide (NFG) in .pdf format, which was the front half of the old Applix release notes. The back half of the Applix ones was the bug fixes which in the later Applix versions were getting to where they needed to be. There was actually a useful synopsis telling you what the nature of the bug was, how and when it could affect you and so on. The 8.4.5 U2 one shows how far along they got with this.
The first thing about IBM is that they don't release a .pdf set of release notes, just the NFG. The supposed "Release Notes" as such are web only. The actual Release Notes page is a largely content-free exercise in verbosity. (An art at which IBM excels, of course.) For an example, see the 10.1.1 one
here. It contains little useful content itself, but redirects you to a couple of other pages such as the Fix List. Which is again no longer in .pdf format but is only
on line. And more to the point is an online page where the error descriptions are so perfunctory that they could be rewritten in Gibberish without too much content being lost. ("PM52889 the base version is the major release number". Yeah. And?) There are links to the PMRs but the only people who have access to them is the people who raised them, so that's pretty much useless. Unlike the later Applix days nobody is taking the time to summarise the bugs to explain exactly what the issue being fixed is.
And why do I care about the things not being available in .pdf format? Because I used to keep the release notes in a folder where I could use Adobe Acrobat's search in files feature to locate certain keywords. Granted, Adobe's search functionality in Acrobat chews great big meaty meatballs; it's not QUITE as bad as the find and replace functionality in Muddler's TI Facileeditor, but it's in no way good or flexible. However for a basic search, it works. "You can still search for things on the Web", I hear people say? Yeah, maybe you can but the chances of being able to filter out the cr@p ain't good. If you look for certain keywords (especially common ones) through a search engine you'll probably come up with 4,258,000 hits, of which the first 4,257,000 are blogs or tweets and the one that you want is maybe, possibly, buried somewhere in that last thousand. When you search a collection of documents, you know that your search will be limited to relevant content only, and won't go looking at web pages that you'll get no value from.
That's the closest I come to nostalgia; the fact that the
whole of the release notes, both new features and bug fixes, were in .a single document in pdf format and searchable as opposed to scattered over random pages at random locations within the digital jungle that IBM passes off as a web site.
stephen waters wrote:Though I am disappointed that the docs for 10.2 install only in English. I really miss having the 10.1 install providing me with every possible language from Azerbijani to Zulu, keeping my hard disk nicely full and giving me a fascinating , slowly moving progress bar to watch for 45 mins while wondering how to fill my time before I go home.
You can always do a custom install and put the whole lot back on. I love the smell of burning hard disk drives in the morning, it smells like {sniffs the air} IBM install packages!
"The horror, the horror..."