I got into the standards business in 1979. When I accepted a position in the Engineering Standards Department at Deere & Company, I had no idea what the standards world outside of our company looked like. There were no computers on our desks. We had terminals connected to a mainframe, but word processing was still a specialty that was centralized. Most of our company standards were created on a clean sheet of paper (literally, in those days) given to a clerk to type, and then a cut and paste (with glue and scissors) was done to make a manuscript. After that we handed it off to a special group that created art, if there was a need, and tables after tables on a photo type setter. Besides overseeing the creation and balloting and the endless revisions, my duties were to be responsible for publishing and distribution of our standards, about 2,000 or so. Embedded in nearly every one of them were references to external standards.
展开▼
