I worked as a Kelly Girl during the late 70s, at one point for the consulting arm of Ernst & Ernst in Los Angeles. Mac McCarthy, Publisher of aNewDomain and co-creator of the Dummies books. Some of us, like Mac McCarthy, actually used dedicated word processors before they used word processing software. 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. 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. While there were earlier word processors, Electric Pencil, WordStar was for many of us the first word processor we could use on a general purpose PC. WordStar, which was God's gift to touch-typists, made it possible to use the control key-at the time the only 'alternative' key most PC keyboards had-to copy, cut, and paste text. Of course, you had to have a power outlet where-ever you went, we were a long, long way from having batteries that could power something like the new iPad for ten hours. This was a portable computer only in the sense that if you absolutely had to move it, you could 'lug' its 24-pounds from one place to another. I first used it on an Osborne 1 'luggable' computer. The first, and the one that counts as a real word processor, was WordStar. I've always been a glutton for punishment. I went from using my 'prized' IBM Selectric II to using two word processors at almost the same time. In my case, I made the change-over in 1980. The horror! The horror! But, then along came word processors and the world changed. Some of us, dare I admit it, wrote by hand on paper. Once upon a time, and it wasn't that long ago, instead of word processors like today's favorites such as Microsoft Word, Google Docs or OpenOffice and its brother LibreOffice, we had to use typewriters.

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Early mac word processor