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Technical Documentation has closely followed the path of social and economic change for several centuries now. With the development of technologically advanced products and services, the need to convey and secure that knowledge and skill grew. One can come across technical documentation as early as the 14^th century when Chaucer detailed the purpose and operation of a navigation device. What Copernicus, Hippocrates, Newton and Leonardo da Vinci wrote as explanatory notes to demonstrate the use of their inventions, can be rightly termed as early examples of technical documentation. The 20^th century technical documentation got developed during World War II, when a major technological upgrade happened in manufacturing weapons and creation of nuclear technologies.

Modern day technical documentation can be attributed to the development of computer science and subsequently the internet. Ever since the first computers were developed to the recent development of some high technology innovations in the 21^st century, the need to clearly instruct, describe and document has grown in acute quantities. The rise in number of technology users worldwide over the last few decades has further accentuated the need for technical documentation.

Traditionally, people developing technology products were the ones creating the technical documentation. However, with the advent of specialization, growth in technical products and services and the subsequent demand to create good documentation worldwide has given the under recognized technical writing professional new dimension. A technical writer is an honest mediator between people who create technology and who use technology.

The impact of internet on technical documentation has been immense. It has lead to development of various writer friendly tools and has added internet as a tool for end users too.

In the 1980s technical writers would write their first drafts in longhand on notepads and send them for processing. However, today it is the age of structured authoring, optimizing information reuse. There is a significant change that has been brought about by technologies like structured authoring, content management systems (CMSs), foreign translation memory systems, and automated publication systems - FrameMaker etc. However what has not changed is the process of technical documentation, which essentially is adding value to the business process by gathering and processing technical data into information and providing the context to convert this information into knowledge.

The domain of technical writers has expanded from a pure publication perspective to a more interactive ( Web 2.0, wikis ) one. More is got done with less time and resources. With the multiplicity of tools available, it is possible for to manage, protect, and share information as a business asset across the organization, in a knowledge driven global economic system.