The Blacksmith™ Tutorial

1994, Airtouch Cellular

Problem

Teach Airtouch's in-house software maintenance team how to use the Blacksmith screen scraper.

Solution

A paper document describing the technical details of using Blacksmith.

Screen scrapers enable a computer programmer on a PC or Macintosh to interact with mainframe computers by simulating the actions of a human user sitting at a mainframe terminal: reading information from the screen and typing information into it. I had enhanced Airtouch's homegrown customer-information system with the ability to check a prospective customer's credit report. Since the future software-maintenance team at Airtouch had little programming experience, I wrote a tutorial for them, explaining how to use Blacksmith:

The Blacksmith Tutorial

HCI Notes

I present this tutorial as an example of the ways in which I:

• present technical information in non-technical language
• interleave graphical and textual elements on paper

I wrote the tutorial because it took me some time to learn Blacksmith, and I wanted to help the maintenance team get up to speed faster than I had. In addition, I took advantage of some of Blacksmith's subtler features. And, lastly, most of the Airtouch personnel were not Macintosh programmers. Thus, I wanted to help them learn Blacksmith in such a way that they could take advantage of it on their own, as well as understand exactly how my code worked.

Environment

In 1995, Airtouch Cellular's Atlanta location had a home-grown, Macintosh-based customer-information system known as Poindexter. I worked for a consulting company that was called in to enhance Poindexter. Part of my job was to add the ability to check a prospective customer's credit report.

Previously, to check a customer's credit, an Airtouch representative would dial into Firestone, open a mainframe terminal window, enter the appropriate data to look up a particular customer, and print the results. My job was to do the same thing from within Poindexter, integrating the credit-check results into the customer-information window. I used Blacksmith to do this.