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Word Processors Through the Years

Typewriter! Whiteout! Ribbon! Carriage Return! That was MY technology when I was writing term papers back in 1975-1982 at the University of Calgary!

Those late nights AND early mornings, pounding away, literally, on my Smith Corona typewriter – trying to balance SPEED with ACCURACY! There was no such thing as DELETE or UNDO … unless you count going through gallons of whiteout! BUT, I had a very HI-TECH version of correcting mistakes!

Basically, it was a dry ‘tape’, with dryer white ‘chalk’ on one side, and a more inert opposite side. But first, you had to recognize that you did INDEED make a typo, AS YOU WERE TYPING! There were no spellcheckers back then! And then, backspace manually TO THE MISTAKE, insert the correction tape, powder side TOWARDS the error, TYPE THE ERROR AGAIN to literally WHITE OUT the mistake, backspace AGAIN, and manually type in the corrected letter! Good times, good times! All this with a single, ORIGINAL, piece of paper in the typewriter! ARGH! And no automatic page feeds so I often ran out of room on my PRISTINE and ORIGINAL PIECE OF PAPER! DOUBLE ARGH!

And then I took my first computer science course! Although technically NOT a word processor, a massive desk with a punched card reader could be consider an early form of a word processor! Every mistake in code (FORTRAN!) I made, took about 30 minutes to actually DISCOVER from the Punch Card Elders who took my deck and ran it into the giant Punched Card Monsters! Then I had to dig out the SINGLE CARD that had a typo or bad code, and type it in again!

The day I discovered the ‘Function Switches’ feature, which would mirror all the text was like a miracle! I would press the copy button, then STOP, type in the corrected command or typo, then continue with copy and the card would appear at the end! Reinsert, hand over the deck and … ANOTHER TYPO FURTHER INTO THE DECK! Repeat as many times as necessary! Good times, good times!

And then, I graduated, not only from U of C, but onto SUPERIOR TECHNOLOGY! Well, at least, at the time, it certainly WAS superior technology! My first teaching gig was not only teaching a Beginner Computer Science course, but DESIGNING IT AS WELL! I earlier posted about Desktop Publishing, but … it was really just basic Word Processing with Apple and Commodore Computers!

Yes, that is the manual for my own Commodore SX-64 that I used for some Grad courses at U of C! And I used the worlds best FREE word processor at the time … SPEEDSCRIPT! A future post will discuss just how amazing the SX-64 computer was! AND IT STILL WORKS!

SpeedScript was free, had a spell checker and even had a PREVIEW of the final page, which was YEARS ahead of anything else out there! And did I mention it was … FREE! YES FREE! And amazingly, it used a markup language that is INCREDIBLY SIMILAR TO WHAT HTML IS NOW! Commodore computers were definitely ahead of their time!

And then a commercial word processor – PaperClip came along and … well, due to budget cuts, only 1 copy was purchased for me! Free is free, right!

And the first ever ‘office suite’ was actually a cartridge based system for .. you guessed it … my SX-64! It was called VIZASTAR and had … EVERYTHING you ever needed for what is now considered an ‘Office Suite’ – Spreadsheet, Database and Graphics … but no word processor sadly!

Why here? A future post will be about my SX-64 AND the cool software I still have, including one of he worlds first ever … LIGHT PEN called Flexidraw! VERY COOL even by today’s standards!

I brought up my Commodore SX-64 to our Systems Open House a few years ago! The theme was ‘Time Travellers – Meet the Team:Systems Through Time‘ Click here to see some photos from a previous post! (Yes, always, more Product Placement!)

And then .. progress marches on. The next generation of hardware and software was WordPerfect on a Commodore IBM clone. What? I bet you didn’t know that Commodore made IBM clones! THEY DID!

And I might start an argument, but I always preferred Corel WordPerfect (MAC) to pretty much any flavour of Word through the years! Okay, so maybe now Office 365 is better! But when I was helping to publish our CALL Proceedings, I made WordPerfect the recommended application. Of course, everyone ignored it, but WordPerfect did Word, BETTER THAN WORD back then! AND IT WAS CANADIAN TOO!

Apple even had their own versions of word processors, including Apple Writer, ClarisWorks, MacWrite, MacWrite Pro, AppleWorks, and now Pages. All good! Used them all for various reasons with great success!

And then there is another package that I have briefly used, and is free for both current WIN and MAC platforms called Libre Office, which was once known as Open Office. I have only used it sparingly, basically enough to answer basic questions about it, and I am not sure it is installed on any computers at UVic anymore, with Office 365 kinda taking over … for free for students and staff! Which, by the way is a VERY GOOD THING!

And then there are now Text Editors – basically a blend of raw ASCII text with minimal word processing features. So, yeah … they are word processors! There are SO many of them, we all have our favourites and they are quick and dirty to see CONTENT as far as I am concerned. If you are using a text editor for word processing …. then let’s talk! LOL!

And if you think about it, creating a post here on OAC is a perfect blend of word processing AND text editor! I can switch to Text if I want to change some nuts and bolts thing with HTML, or just use the New Post and … see what happens! YAY FOR OAC! Many thanks to “mvh” for his patience whenever I have an OAC question for him!