Prior to my doing this manual, the typist/secretarial pool (at least in Tech Pubs) passed down a hand copied list of ~8 commands - getting at least 3 wrong-for these tools. I discovered that the text editor had a programmable string editor in it, which, for example, could easily be coded to display "n bottles of beer on the wall," beeping at the end of each verse.Īnd I received the ultimate tribute for my work. And oh yeah, I documented the heck out of it, boiling down a lot of info and mis-info to a stack of 3x5 index cards of verified facts. I got to commission original art, use fun quotes. MICROSOFT WORD VS WORD PERFECT MANUALPoints 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): 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. Had an even more exotic introduction to word processing: My first desktop-based word processor was Peachtext, on an Apple II, for a consulting project! He actually typed with no errors, too, but would let the machine retype a page so he could get a cigarette break. I typed at 110, but 130 was markedly faster. He was such a fast typist that I could not tell, without looking, whether it was him or the automated system typing given page at about 130 wpm. My colleague sat out of my sight, behind me. It as nice to have a little break every ten minutes or so. Our process was to type each page of the document, then take a break while the thing typed a clean copy of that page, which took about a minute. The Redactron was a Selectric connected to a box about three feet high next to our desks we'd type on paper, the box would record what we typed on cassettes, we could correct while typing or go back and make changes (up to a point), then print out a finished, cleaned page.
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