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Editing Proposals with (Red) Pen and Ink

TThen there was the way proposals were edited, with red pens. It was
called Redlining. It was done with a red pen.

The User Support Branch was charged with handling all pre-observation
interraction with observers, including receiving and maintaining the
proposals. No one else had the permission to actually edit a
proposal. Science Planning Branch then received the proposals in a
formal Handoff, complete with cover message and approval by the
relevant authorities. SPB would then run transformation on a proposal
and attempt to load it into Spike. The first batch of these props was
the original SV proposals, observatory commissioning exercises that
were devilishly complicated. These had been written and re-written
many times over the years leading up to launch, as the instruments and
ground system evolved. Trans found them to be full of errors - the
first run of transformation on the Cycle 0 proposal pool generated
10,000 (ten thousand - the real number was nine thousand and change)
errors and warnings. These ranged from false alarms (trans itself was
very young then) to typos to deep logical inconsistencies (Su 2 after
1, and 1 after 2).

To fix a problem in a proposal, a paper copy of it had to be marked up
with corrections (with a RED pen) and sent back to USB - formally,
with proper entries in the tracking database (which was on a
Macintosh, I think.) The corrections were then entered by hand, and
the proposal handed off back to SPB. If the problem was found by
SPSS, then there were two more formal handoffs, with Delivery Notices
and everything.

All this was done on the "P" version of a proposal. Each prop had two
incarnations, the "P" version (for "Provisional", I think) and the "C"
version. I forget what the "C" stood for. We could only work on the
"P" version, but we could only execute the "C" version. So when all
the bugs in a program were thought to have been worked out, yet
another formal handoff was made (by USB) where the "P" version was
copied into the "C" version, delivered to SPB to be transed and
finally delivered to SPSS. (With all the proper handoff ceremonies.)
There were two complete sets of trans output files, reports, etc. and
if a prop really was golden, the last "P" and "C" versions were
identical.

Oh, temptation... We thought it was a good idea at the time, so with
my boss' concurrence, I wrote a little program that changed each "P"
in the trans output files to a "C". Or almost all; I missed a couple
of obscure places where the "P" distinguished the file from a "C".
Oh, dear, what a commotion that caused. We beat a hasty retreat from
that line of processing, and went back to doing everything twice.
Twice, and only with a red pen.