Friday, October 16, 2020
Word Processing -- 1988 style
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Let's go back to 1988 before Chicagoland had multiple area codes or even cell phones. A time before everyone had computers in their homes. To those thrilling days of yesteryear when a fast computer was a 286 and a word processing system with a fast computer, full page monitor, full-featured word processing and a laser printer cost about $5000 and I worked in a computer store. I published a newsletter for customers. Here is Newsletter # 3 from June 1988.
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1 comment:
From my friend Mark Lebovitz
Heh. Oh, my. I remember all of those early word processors, and more!
In my first professional programming job, which was just a summer stint working for a CFP, I was working on KayPro "portable" computers, mostly running CP/M, using WordStar as my C programming editor. I got to like WordStar. In retrospect, I'm not sure why. The fact of the matter is that its command keystroke sequences were arcane, to say the least. I guess I just got used to it.
I used an electric typewriter through most of college. I was finally introduced to using a word processor for writing compositions during my senior year. I want to say it was MacWrite, but it was whatever word processor the college got with their Fat Macs back in 1985 or '86. The first time I actually sat down in front of one of those Macs was early 1987.
In my first full-time job, the company's word processor of choice was Microsoft Word. The year was 1987, Windows 1.0 was the current version and a bad joke (Windows 2.0 would be introduced late that year), so we're talking MS Word 4.0 for DOS. I don't remember much about it other
than menus that ran across the bottom of the screen. I found some info about it online, and it seems that it was capable of opening multiple files for editing, and even doing crude WYSIWYG, but I don't remember trying to do either of those things with it. Oh, yeah, and it was
capable of printing in the background while the user went back to typing in the foreground. That was a feature I never used, either, mainly because I rarely worked on more than one document at a a time, anyway.
WYSIWYG would've been quite the stretch back then, since most people were using monochrome monitors with 9-pin monochrome display adapters that had no graphical capabilities.
The second company I worked for was a bank that used MultiMate Advantage, which was replaced with MultiMate 4.0 after we rolled out Novell 3.2 network (because MultiMate Advantage wasn't LAN-friendly). As I recall, MultiMate took some heat from critics for starting the user
off on a menu screen instead of a document editor, but most new employees seemed to find it reasonably easy to learn. This was from 1988 to 1994, and most of the computers there had either CGA or EGA monitors (relatively crude graphics capabilities), so again, WYSIWIG wasn't really a thing I dealt with at the time. Neither was Windows, since a (relatively) corporate-friendly version of that didn't come out until the end of 1993, just a couple months before I left. I did get really good at multitasking with QuarterDeck DESQview on my own office
computer, though. I also got my hands on a copy of WordPerfect 6.0 for DOS, which was decidedly more fun to use than MultiMate, but was a bit of a strain for the computers the bank was using at the time.
In 1989, I bought my first home computer, and for the first year or so, I got by with the text editor that was part of Central Point Software's PC Tools. At some point, I needed more functionality, so I broke down and bought a copy of Microsoft Works. Full-fledged word processors and spreadsheet programs still sold individually for upwards of $300 apiece, and were very much out of my reach at the time.
All my subsequent jobs had me working on Windows computers, generally with whatever Microsoft Office for Windows was current at the time. I heard of, but never actually used, Ami Pro, DisplayWrite, Nota Bene, pfs:Write, Samna, and XYWrite.
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M A R K L E B O W I T Z
Lebowitz IT Services LLC
Editor's note: IBM DOS 4.0 was released in July 1988. Microsoft released PC DOS 2.1 in November 1983. IBM DOS 1.0 could not access hard drives. 2.0's big improvement was the ability to use a hard drive.
Novell's Advanced NetWare version 2.x, was launched in 1986, was written for the then-new 80286 CPU.
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