Documenting a Computer Architecture

The documentation of a computer architecture requires that special conditions be satisfied in its preparation to ensure exactness, consistency, and completeness. One group in IBM, Central Systems Architecture, has spent many years refining procedures for producing quality documentation of this type, most notably for the System/370 architecture and the System/370 Extended Architecture (370-XA). This paper describes the steps this group performs in documenting a computer architecture, the requirements identified for the finished description, and the procedures followed to satisfy those requirements.