Originally Posted by
Owain Glyndwr
@ OK465
I take your point, but I do wonder if we aren't being a little harsh when we judge a 1988 presentation by the standards of reproduction equipment available today.
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Both these "faults" are present in the published charts, but they could have been then state of the art
Quite. I've been saying this for a while, but it's easy to take for granted the relative simplicity in transferring this kind of data and rendering it in different ways today compared to the hassle it was even 20 years ago. For example, in 1990 (when this final report was published) the current spreadsheets could not handle the amount of data that was dumped from the DFDR - and there was no way to even get that data into that format directly other than manual transcription - the risk of miskeys would have been too great.
Even if it were possible, the current version of Windows was 3.0, and the current version of Word was 1.0 (for Windows). In June 1990, these would have been effectively brand new products, and while it was technically possible to insert Excel data into WFW 1.0, Excel could not generate charts - that didn't really come into its own until about 1993-4.
Obviously the realisation that these tools could be used in this way did come, and modern reports use that method routinely these days. However, this was a result of a near-revolution in desktop computing power throughout the 1990s, and simply wasn't available for the publication of this report. As BARKINGMAD says, we're talking about an accident that happened almost 26 years ago, and a final report that is almost 24 years old!