TECHNICAL MEMORANDUM                                          TM-26-003

SUBJECT:      Why these posts look like 1960s engineering memos
DATE:         2026-07-09


SUMMARY. The posts in this log are technical memoranda: SUMMARY
first, numbered paragraphs, findings separated from assumptions and
conclusions. The format is borrowed from 1950s/60s systems
engineering. This memo records why - and why the log exists again
at all.

1. BACKGROUND. I used to blog. First on snipsnap.org, the project
site of SnipSnap, the Java wiki engine Stephan Schmidt and I wrote
at Fraunhofer in the early 2000s - my posts ran on our own engine.
Later on thinkberg.com. Both are history. The engine made it into the
Software Heritage archive; the writing habit did not. Twenty years
of writing happened anyway - as internal records nobody outside a
project ever saw.

2. FINDINGS. What the memo format does that my blogs did not:

   2.1 SUMMARY first. The whole result before any detail. A reader
   who stops after one paragraph got everything that matters -
   that is respect, not laziness.

   2.2 Numbered paragraphs. Documents that can cite each other
   precisely ("TM-26-001 §2.2") stay useful for years. Prose links
   rot; paragraph numbers don't.

   2.3 Findings, assumptions, and conclusions are separate
   sections. Most engineering arguments go wrong by blending what
   is known, what is believed, and what is judged. The format makes
   the blend impossible.

   2.4 Plain text, 72 columns. It has survived every platform
   migration since the Apollo program. My blog posts did not
   survive two of mine.

   2.5 A memo is short by construction. The format was designed
   for engineers with too much to read; it happens to be exactly
   right for a feed where attention is measured in seconds.

3. CONCLUSIONS. A format that has outlived sixty years of tooling
churn is a safer home for writing than any engine - including,
it turns out, the ones I write myself. Blogs die of ceremony:
title-crafting, hero images, the pressure to have an opinion.
A memo has no ceremony. You state what you found, number it,
and stop.

4. ACTION. The log restarts, in this format, numbered from a
register like every project log I have kept since. This memo
records its own decision.