DocOps Origins

The first recorded use of the ‘DocOps’ term is attributed to James Turcotte, who coined the term in a 2014 presentation (Bier, 2014) in which he explained how Computer Associates (CA) kept product documentation updated and under continuous improvement.

Later on, Jodie Putrino, a member of the Write the Docs community, defined DocOps as: “a set of practices that works to automate and integrate the process of developing documentation across engineering, product, support, and, of course, technical writing teams.”, further expanding DocOps’ scope.

Today, DocOps is a practice that applies to all enterprise documentation needs, covering public and private documentation and focusing also on business documentation rather than just technical writing.

While it is fashionable to rebrand most IT functions with the ‘Ops’ suffix (DataOps, MLOps, etc.) these days, the fundamentals of DocOps are 70 years old.

For example, the DocOps principles of generative content, shared responsibility, truth proximity, and low cognitive load respond to observations first made by Vannevar Bush (1945) by the end of World War II, when describing the Memex, in his essay titled “As We May Think”. The Memex, a microfilm-based ‘browser’ machine is probably the first description of a contemporary documentation system. Bush, in reference to the paper-technology of his time, wrote:

“Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose”

Bush observed that the general problem was not the lack of information—published in the world—but the sheer amount of information being produced, and our inability to tap on it, in part due to the use of obsolete technology:

“The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.”

By 1963, Ted Nelson coined the term hypertext, culminating in the design of a hypertext software system called ‘Xanadu’. The key documentation system tenets in this guide (such as embedding and blending) are based on his insights. Nelson’s (1987) foresight shows that he was decades ahead of his time. Consider, for example, what his prediction for the year 2020 was:

“Forty years from now (if the human species survives), there will be hundreds of thousands of file servers—machines storing and dishing out materials. And there will be hundreds of millions of simultaneous users, able to read from billions of stored documents, with trillions of links among them.”

In the same decade, in 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated the practical application of both Bush’s ideas and Nelson’s hypertext, in the famous “mother all of all demos”, which showcased a computer system called oN-Line System (NLS). NLS featured a mouse-driven graphical user interface (GUI), dynamic links, version control, and real-time collaboration. For contrast, the Apple Lisa, one of the first home computers to feature a mouse-driven GUI, first appeared in 1983.

Finally, in the early 1980s, Tim Berners-Lee would write Enquire at The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), which was the predecessor of the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee, 1999). Both Enquire and the World Wide Web actually started as DocOps-principled documentation systems.

Berners-Lee wrote Enquire and then the first Web browser on a NeXT workstation in response to the intellectual challenge of having to wrap his head around a complex organization—the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. His job was to dismantle a control room’s obsolete hardware consisting of “columns of oscilloscopes and power supplies and sequencing equipment” and replace it with computers running “much more powerful” software:

“The big challenge for contract programmers was to try to understand the systems, both human and computer, that ran this fantastic playground.”

We will repeatedly come back to the observations made by Bush, Nelson, and Berners-Lee in the articulation of DocOps principles and documentation system tenets.