Magnetic tape was the first reusable storage medium for typed information. On the tape, information could be stored, replayed that is, retyped automatically from the stored information , corrected, reprinted as many times as needed, and then erased and reused for other projects.
This development marked the beginning of word processing as it is known today. It was a translation of the German word textverabeitung , coined in the late s by Ulrich Steinhilper, an IBM engineer.
He used it as a more precise term for what was done by the act of typing. The cards could then be used to recall and reprint text. These were useful mostly to companies which sent out large numbers of form letters. However, only about one page-worth of text could be stored on each card.
With the screen, text could be entered and corrected without having to produce a hard copy. Printing could be delayed until the writer was satisfied with the material. Developed by IBM in the early s for use in data processing that is, traditional number computation , it was soon adopted by the word processing industry. Previous storage media could only hold one or two pages of text, but the early disks were capable of holding 80 to pages.
This increased storage capacity permitted the creation and easy editing of multipage documents without the necessity of changing storage receptacles. The most important advance in word processing was the change from "hard wired" instructions built into the machinery to software on disks.
When the programs were part of the equipment they were difficult to change and expensive to upgrade. Programs on disks could be updated more economically, since a rewritten program could be loaded into and used with the same hardware as the old one. Word processing is now "one of the most common general applications for personal computers. One important innovation was the development of spelling check and mailing list programs.
Authors seem to assume that their readers will automatically be familiar with recent developments, despite the fact that if they were they would not be buying the literature. WordStar, put out by Micropro International, has emerged as the industry standard in software packages, though others surpass it in one feature or another.
These are listed in Appendix A. It was not possible to describe all their features without turning the appendix into a book; however, such descriptions may be found in the sources from which the list was compiled see the notes. To partially remedy this lack, a list of features standard in most current word processing programs has been provided in Appendix B.
The VT was a wonder. It featured word wrap hooray! This was all implemented in 32K of memory. Core memory. Daniel Dern , freelance writer. It was a lot of fun.
I got to commission original art, use fun quotes. 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 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. And I received the ultimate tribute for my work. Curtis Franklin, Jr. I wrote my first thesis in vi, then moved on to WordStar, something I've blocked from memory but it was based on the Wang word processor and XyWrite.
The tragic thing is that I can't really remember my last physical address, but I can still remember my most common TECO setup string. As I recall, when I started at PC Magazine in , they gave me a typewriter for my first two weeks there, and then they dropped a PC with a 10MB hard drive on my desk with a copy of WordStar on it and no instructions.
Played with a lot of others along the way, but once I started with Microsoft Word, I pretty much stayed there, although I'm now using LibreOffice Writer on my personal laptop and Google Docs more often than not. But professors did not like getting papers printed on a dot-matrix printer in , so I returned to my primary word processor: an Olivetti electric typewriter and large quantities of white-out.
I wrote a few letters on that before being told by my XO [Executive Officer] aboard the Iowa that computers were clerical devices and no officer should be caught dead using one, after which I left it in storage during deployment and went back to the IBM Selectric. I would cast longing glances at the Xerox in the ship's office every now and then. And then I ended up ashore as Zenith s started being bought by the boatload, and ended up teaching my new boss how to use WordPerfect 4.
Of all these old word processors, I should add, as opposed to the text processors like vi, only WordPerfect is still being sold today. My first computer was a KayPro II, which we named "Ozzie" after a character in a romance I'd written, the sale of which paid for him and a daisy wheel printer. It came with Perfect Writer and WordStar 2.? This was in about or While the KayPro couldn't provide such bells and whistles as boldface, at least it showed page breaks.
What printed out depended on what daisy wheel I put in the printer, of course. I churned out four more romances on it, plus I don't know how much other stuff. She was Peggy's computer.
Thank heavens for code overlays in. COM files. A few years later, my cousin and I moved to PC-Write, which was thoroughly WordStar compatible - including the extended diamond - when it was clear WordStar would never be upgraded I guess it was, eventually.
I think we needed new printer drivers or something. I moved on to WordPerfect 4. And in fact, I refused for almost another decade to give up my IBM AT keyboard because later ones moved the Control key from where God himself had placed it, next to the A key, for the left pinkie finger.
I didn't use it much, partly because typing wasn't my job that belonged to the Chief Yeoman and partly because I didn't have time. Everything was on K hard sector floppy disks. Hard disks did exist, but they were the size of washing machines and nobody could afford one. Word processing, however, allowed people to write, edit, and produce documents by using a computer. The first computer word processors were line editors, software-writing aids that allowed a programmer to make changes in a line of program code.
Altair programmer Michael Shrayer decided to write the manuals for computer programs on the same computers the programs ran on. He wrote a somewhat popular software program called the Electric Pencil in It was the actual first PC word processing program. He left to start MicroPro International Inc. The 3. Within three years, WordStar was the most popular word processing software in the world.
However, by the late s, programs like WordPerfect knocked Wordstar out of the word processing market after the poor performance of WordStar Said Rubenstein about what happened:. Communications as we know it today, in which everyone is for all intents and purposes is their own publisher, would not exist if WordStar had not pioneered the industry. Even then, Arthur C. We use cookies and collect some information about you to enhance your experience of our site; we use third-party services to provide social media features, to personalize content and ads, and to ensure the website works properly.
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Learn more about your data on Quizzclub. OK Set preferences. What was the name of the world's first word-processing program? John Moore. Released in by Micropro International Inc. Feb 11, PM. David Stokes. Sep 2, AM. A typewriter us not a word processor any more than a pencil! Aug 21, AM. I went with WordStar
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