- BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II HOW TO
- BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II MANUAL
- BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II PC
- BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II PLUS
BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II MANUAL
Points out that: Arguably, many of the programs people are talking about are "text editors" rather than "word processors." E.g., vi, TECO, vs PC-Write, etc.ĭuring my year as technical editor at Prime Computers, I wrote (after several others had failed) the manual for their text editor, EDITOR, and word processing macros language, RUNOFF (a variant/descendant of roff, nroff, etc):įirst word processor for me was TECO running under RT-11 on my DEC LSI-11/02. This was all implemented in 32K of memory. It featured word wrap (hooray!), virtual scrolling through arbitrarily long manuscripts (paging happened invisibly), and even hyphenation & justification. These all ran on DEC's RSX-11D operating system. (The formatting language was Runoff.)Ī couple of years later my word processor of choice was the one built into the VT-71 smart terminal, talking to a TMS-11 typesetting system. When I moved to Digital Equipment Corporation in 1976, a first I used EDT running on RSX-11M, and later on VAX VMS.
TRIX was a local implementation of SNOBOL, and the AC dialect supplied word processing commands on top of it. My first word processor was TRIX AC, running on the supercomputer cluster at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The department, and the idiot boss, needed a consulting firm to come in and do an efficiency report on them!
BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II PLUS
Which of course added at least one time-consuming step, plus took them longer to write, plus they hated handwriting everything.
BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II HOW TO
We discovered that the accountant-consultants all knew how to type, but were forbidden to type up their initial reports because the division chief believed typing was for clerks and secretaries so they were obliged to hand-write everything. In some cases it was faster to retype the whole document rather than try to edit in the changes. (We were using Redactron dedicated word processors, which used cassette tapes to record the documents.
We'd type up the notes (and, often, edit them for grammar and spelling), send them back, then get back marked-up edits, which we'd retype, then these drafts would go to the bosses, who'd mark them up some more - and we'd retype them again. So the two accountants who worked on a project would handwrite their reports on yellow pads and send them to me and another guy who were the typing pool for this unit. Most of us were there in the early days of word processing and are still fond of our first word processors. I asked some of my fellow technology writers in the Internet Press Guild, a non-profit organization promoting excellence in technology journalism.
But, at the time we were just happy to have any kind of word processing. Steve Jobs would, of course, look in on the Alto and see the mouse-based, bit-mapped graphics future that lead to the Macintosh.
BEST WORD PROCESSOR FOR APPLE II PC
Indeed, I still use vi for editing Linux configuration files and some light word processing.Īs for graphical user interfaces? What are you talking about? Oh sure, there were mini-computers like the Xerox Alto, but in the early days of the PC world we used character-based interfaces and we liked it. To this day, both WordStar and vi's control sequences are locked into my fingers. This text-processing program still lives on in every Linux and Unix system ever made. Fonts were pretty much beyond us in these days of daisy-wheel and dot-matrix printers.Īt the same time, I was also learning vi. So long as you didn't want, oh say, fonts. It was also the first popular What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) word processor.