They deserved an hour-long program. Stuart did a fantastic job keeping everyone moving along and it was a shame he had to keep cutting people off in the middle of interesting discussions because of time constraints.
At least in the 80's. In the 90's and early 2000's this show really went off track though with the bizarre new sets, guests who were mostly just marketing people, and Stuart focusing the coverage to a purely consumer-oriented level.
@@ericwood3709 Most mechanical keyboards circa 2014 to 2019, and perhaps beyond, is cheap and tacky and scratchy, and is full of "gamer-centric" bollocks packaged with 500MB software just for macros and lighting configurations. Give me an IBM Model M please?
@@abzhuofficial Check out Unicomp. They're still making a Model M type of keyboard with the same unique switches and the same basic styling. I have two of them, one a larger design most like the original, and one smaller one. They are available in USB and PS/2, in beige and black, and with different choices of keys (103, 105-key, Sun, PC and Mac). Lots of options, all of decent quality.
@@ericwood3709 I have seen them, and have considered them if I was planning to buy a mechanical keyboard once again. For now though, an OEM chiclet keyboard is serving me really well, surprising enough.
Look how cool and classy these guys were. Notice how they talk with clarity and intelligence. When one is speaking the others are silent and listening keenly. You hardly see this today.
So nostalgic. I remember discovering this show in the 1980s like it was yesterday. I couldn't wait for each new episode. That was back in the days when computing and computers were fun.
was it just as common to have to spend several months trying to understand how the software works? Modern software is so bloated, it's hard to understand what does the necessary stuff and what just sits there
My first wordprocessor was wordstar. Till that time I had no knowledge about word processing. I had heard about line word processors that were just an enhanced version of typewriter. I had often written letters by hand and if I made a mistake I would have to tear the page away and rewrite the whole page from beginning. With wordstar I could do so many things like If I wanted to change the flow of words or change a whole paragraph of text I could just mark a block of text and place it anywhere in the documents. It changed the way I expressed myself in words and a whole new way to letter writing. I could mail merge letters to a group of people instantly. Even with the Dos based application I could do so much. Todays advanced enhanced wordprocessors dont add much to productivity the way wordstar did. I miss those days.
Mine too was WS. Writing term papers became less painful, and mail merge using it and Data Star with a Star Micronix NX-10 dot matrix printer was a breeze.
I learned Wordstar at Control Data Institute during 1987-1988. I liked word processing better than keypunch keyboarding. When it comes to the microcomputer, word processing is my springboard.
And now, 40 years later, we are at the beginning of the AI revolution where the computers just do the writing for us. Good or bad, that is a hell of a lot of innovation in the span of just my career.
When you look at the costs of these programs , it reminds me how important it is to keep a few computers from the early 1980's on up to today , I get upset when people think of them as old junk and scrap them , the software is out there in thrift shops and I spend most of my income on older softwares as I know just how much it originally cost I am glad there are preservation societies saving the older software and hardware :) QC
I'm an old software collector too. It's really amazing when i review software how they had almost all features 30 years ago, but UI is terrible and the resource limits are so visible (High Resolution). And i agree with @Dylan that i miss boxes (especially the old boxed games) and printed manuals and release cycles that were sane. 2-3 years for a new version that was worth buying. Soon all is gone and behind software-as-a-service barriers.
I used to tutor introduction to WordPerfect 5 in college. Gotta say I made good money doing it. When you get paid by the hour, having people struggle to remember key combinations is quite profitable. However, these word processors are a bit before my time. I would have been in 5th grade when this episode ran.
I was going to write about that when I saw you did first: the problem is that 99.999999 of the population in present times has no idea what MSDOS command EDLIN was for.
Wordstar and Wordperfect are the commonly used word processor software we had in school back in the 80s. By the 90s we were introduced by Microsoft Word. It was an amazing advancement in word processing. It took over the market and dominated it worldwide until this day.
@@jkeelsncMy understanding is that the reason Microsoft Word does not have Reveal Codes is because of the way it formats it documents. Most word processors use codes to begin and end formatting, just like WordPerfect and Wordstar do. But with MS Word instead of inserting formatting codes into the document, it applies formatting to the various areas of the document. As an example, if you format a paragraph it applies that format to the entire paragraph. That is why where is no Reveal Codes, there are no codes to reveal although it is possible to see the applied formatting (I think you just have to hover over the text with your mouse but I could be wrong). Also, many items that are in the document are already there but they won't be seen unless you use them. That is the reason you have to view headers and footers rather than insert them. They are already in the document, but won't appear unless you use them. That is one of the reason that MS Word Documents are so large. As a test I created a one-character document and saved it as plain text, then I saved it as an Rich Text Format (RTF) file, and then as an MS-Word document. In plain text it was 1 byte, in RTF it was 32 bytes (RTF files contains several bytes of formatting data at the beginning of the file), and the MS Word file was 32KB.
I remember writing a text editor back in the day. I used Pascal with in-line 65C02 assembly and it was about 1,000 lines. Word Processors must have been hideously huge.
Have you noticed? How articulate, intelligent and deeply versed in the subject the guests are, I'm in the industry, and sometime I find it hard to absorb when some Tech luminary is explaining his / her concept. Maybe societal changes I guess...
Learn something new every day!! I had no idea there were some 150 different word processing programs as of 1983. At that time, I only knew of three: Perfect Writer, WordStar and Word Perfect. (Perfect Writer was a program bundled with the Kaypro II computers).
There were also a number of free word processors available at the time. One that I used was Galaxy, a Wordstar compatible word processor that was pretty good at the time. Although it had its quirks (you had to separate the paragraphs with a blank line, otherwise it would merge them all together when you reformatted the document), it was a pretty good word processor for the time.
That's really funny that there were word processors in the 1980s that assumed the user understood a handful of really basic grammar terms, just the bare minimum...compared to how that would go over today. Wow. And a stylistic analyzer that identifies sentence types and uses it as a factor to determine reading level. That's impressive. God, there is this whole alternate course of history in which computers continued to develop but GUIs never got introduced and in which Eldin's philosophy of "making computers people-literate" never replaced "making people computer-literate". I want that alternate, text-based past back.
I was in college in 83, and the word processor we used was SCRIPSIT. If you forgot just one step, your work disappeared completely. You could save a document to the floppy disk, but if you also forgot to close the file, it was gone forever.
@no name Do you have this problem in general with bright(er) light sources? If so, you might want to see a doctor about it. There are special glasses you can wear.
@no name Yeah, I too prefer dark backgrounds. I just remembered Alec from the channel Technology Connections. He too wears special glasses because he has eye problems when staring at a screen all day.
I designed & manufactured a CPU upgrade for the KP that worked at 12 MHz. It fit in the Z80 socket with a 10 MHz Z80 (pushed to 12 MHz) plus 64K of high speed static ram. Sold a total of 3 or 4 of them. ;(
I also believe that a requirement to be on the Computer Chronicles in the early 1980s was that you had to have a lot of facial hair, or big glasses, and preferably both. Except Stewart Cheifet, who was all covered by a sweet comb over.
Since 2002 after I had my first microcomputer, I discovered printer fonts that were included on a disk with my purchase of my first Canon color laser printer. Also, I bought printer fonts on compact discs. I have a separate disc with downloaded fonts. I loaded the fonts that came from the Canon printer CD and Fonts Deluxe disc in the Fonts folder on to a CD-RW disc. Then I loaded it into my second microcomputer, which is a Dell Inspiron. It came preloaded with Microsoft Windows 10 Home and Microsoft Office 2016 Professional. That is the main reason I care not to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 11. The first reason is that I may not afford to buy hardware. I do believe that generating printer fonts on old monochrome laser printers that had font cartridges may have been difficult to use fonts of different sizes. I missed that operation and probably was promoted to use a color laser printer in 2002, as well as Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office XP Professional. There were some old opportunities that I have likely missed.
Or later the cost of vectored fonts, i.e. Adobe. Bill Gates hated the whole pay per font thing and made it a quest to get Truetype fonts incorporated into Windows as a standard operating system feature.
I remember using it in school in 1983. When I finally got my own PC clone in 1986, I opted for WordPerfect (version 4.2) instead. I had great fun with WordStar in those early days though.
I learned Wordstar at Control Data Institute in 1988. First, I learned the IBM Displaywriter with TextPak 4, then the Wang OIS, and Wordstar in the IBM PC. I liked word processing better than the keypunch keyboarding done on the key-to-disk data terminal. Word processing reinforces my typewriter-like keyboarding, whereby keypunch defeated the purpose.
Interesting to see the genesis of word processors. First one I used (if memory serves) was WordPerfect in the early ‘90’s or late 80’s. I had a monochromatic monitor but at school it was a blue screen. You had to physically run a spell checker which was a big tech breakthrough at the time. I think it was Msword in the mid to late 90’s that started underlining words in red as you typed - what a revolution! Anyway, still annoyed with word when you just want things placed somewhere or just get rid of that last blank page and it still wont do it.
Hah. My very first word processing software was something called EasyWriter. Then I switch to WordStar because that's what the writing lab was using in college. Later, we switched to WordPerfect, which I hated at first but then grew to love. (I still think that it was the best word processor ever written.) Unfortunately, Microsoft won the marketing game and managed to dethrone WordPerfect. Now, we're all stuck with Word (i.e., Turd).
@@JamesSmith-ix5jd Word, unfortunately. I don’t like it but what else can one do in the modern business world. I still think that WordPerfect is the superior word processor, but there are compatibility issues with-you guessed it-Word… and everyone uses Word.
Not only you would want to do some simple word processing, but heavy-duty word processing with such a powerful application to do some advanced tasks such as mail merge, table of contents, index, printing labels, etcetera.
In 1989, I used a word processing program called Xywrite at a typist hired in a graphics shop to learn typesetting. It was a DOS-based program. The only thing I did not like about the job was that it ended in a layoff.
@@vernonsmith6176I used it at home and it was great word processor. While it wasn't as powerful as the big boys (WordStar and WordPerfect), it was very easy to use. It also had some features that the others didn't have, such as adding file descriptions that would appear when you pulled up a list of documents, the ability to open and save in a large number of formats, and low distractions when came to actually typing (the screen only displayed what was needed, and the typing area took up most of the screen). While it wasn't perfect, it was fine for home use and it likely would have been fine for professional work for many people.
Ooh the memories. I remember "The Computer Chronicles". I remember Gary Kildall and I had a Radio Shack Model 100! (actually I still have it somewhere around here).
'Analyzation' isn't quite as bad as 'utilization', which is a real word--in fact, the most inefficient word in common English: five syllables that can be replaced with three letters.
Text editors: For coding scary government database software Word processors: For writing scary government letters to send out to people before Christmas
SHHHH, they'll hear you...! Unironically, the Government really does spy on people... It's quite a pickle, though. How do you keep the people safe without knowing about ANYTHING no one wants you to know? It's more than reasonable to have the right to privacy, but unless a messianic scumbag uses Windows XP with Internet Explorer, instead of Linux or *BSD, with something like the TOR Browser, it'll be hard to get to them. How do you know when, and if, to cross that line of privacy into intrusion? *Que FBI Door Breaking*
In the early 1980s, Wang dominated the word-processing market. Then Ashton-Tate's MultiMate came along. Printing a document was always a surprise... no WYSIWYG in those days😂😂😂
Unfortunately, sometimes I think that WYSIWYG as it has become was a negative move for word processing. It caused people to spend so much time worrying about how the text would look rather than its content. There was a joke (I think it was Dave Berry who said it) that for every minute you spend actually writing you would spend 10 minutes deciding how it would look. That's why I prefer to send plain text e-mails and prefer texting over e-mailing. To avoid the issue, I take a kind of document (say a letter) and decide how I'm going to format it and make it a template. From then on I don't spend time formatting the document since it is already done.
One of the most essential software even today. They even had spellcheck lol. Wow, they even did it at a level it could reccommend a sexist word replacement and even writing styles.
And these days Word Processors like that don't really exist anymore. That has been replaced by desktop publishing programs with wysiwyg. How times change...
Were there no better terminals in 1983? That one at the end (dialing in to the Unix system at 1200 baud) has such a dim display, you can't even see the text on the wide shot.
10:23 "People literacy". I like that. What Jim Edlin describes here basically is a very early form of what we call UX or User Experience today. The user sees symbols and colors he already understands and can find those symbols and colors on the keyboard, so his experience using this software should generally be better than with other software where the user has to become "computer literate" in order to use it.
"It will take the computer about 15 sec. . " to check the small document for spelling! Yet at the time it was magic to be able to do that on a personal computer. But was that Oasis system a PC or just a monitor hooked to a mini-computer. But in 1982 and 1983 WANG was the king of word processing. . .until the IBM PC and Apple II killed them.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. They identified sexist language as a problem in 1983 already and we still have to deal with the same problem almost 40 years later. Damn.
@@DataWaveTaGo People tend to forget that the real customer for Office nowadays is the office worker, the magazine editor, and other professionals. Regular Joe Six-Pack isn't going to use even half the crap that's in Office, but if you work in the corporate world or in publishing, you need what Office (and LibreOffice, to be fair) have to offer.
Of course it changed much. Some of the features that affect anyone: Unicode, vertical cell merging, new image formats, ligatures and stylistic variants...
Wow, a terminal with smart quotes. Must've been using a custom character set for that. I also like complicated and expensive the software needed to be due to primitive hardware. A spellchecker that also finds duplicated words, you like totally need a separate $300 package for that!
And that was $500 in 1980 with Wordstar. With inflation adjustment, that's nearly $1500 in today's money. Holy crap that was a lot but Wordstar couldn't keep up with the sale demand.
And to think in just a few short years Microsoft would put 99% of all these word processor makers out of business and drive Gary Kildall to an early death :(
those poor people bought something that looked like the next big thing, but BAM 2 years later it would be dead, the hardware had improved greatly and better monitors, operating systems and software would make your stuff obsolete, just when you got familiar with it. And that would repeat itself for at least a decade. Today you can work perfectly fine on an old Dual Core or i3 from 10 years ago , running the same software that a 2019 system would use. And MS Word hasn't changed much since 2007
Ah, the days when price actually meant something was better. Generally, anyway. Not like today, where the five dollar item is made in the same factory as the thousand dollar item, it's just that the more expensive one has a brand name label applied to it at the end, then put in a more fancy box.
For Word Processing today all you need is any Raspberry PI + Monitor + Keyboard. So about 100 Dollar or just get some old Laptop and install Linux or Freedos on it. I guess of you could get some trash Keyboard + Monitor and get a Rapi Zero + SD-Card, so maybe as low as 20 Dollar.
Fortunately, I use a Dell desktop computer that I call my "keyboard." It is my main [powerful] typewriter. I use a color laser printer, complete with a scanner and copier, and it prints professional-looking documents. The documents and copies approach typesetting quality. I am home very often and do all of my "professional" printing in the privacy of my home.
Due to the cost of the big programs, some people sought out lower-cost alternatives. I did that a number of times since I didn't want to pay more than $400 for a program to use at home. One of the programs I liked was Professional Write (paid about $60 for it). It was described as the 10-speed of word processors, because sometimes a 10-speed bike can get you to your destination faster than a car. Even WordPerfect sought out that market by releasing LetterPerfect. It was stripped down version of WordPerfect (they removed some of the features from WordPerfect and it cost about 1/5 the price of WordPerfect) that was compatible with regular WordPerfect (the commands for the features that were there was the same and the document format was the same). There were also a number of free alternatives. One of the major ones was PC-Write, which had a feature set to compete with the major programs. One that I used was Galaxy, a word processor that produced Wordstar-compatible documents and fit on one 5.25" floppy disc.
It started with a spell check feature, then a grammar check feature and it escallated to ..... AUTOCORRECT. Making people look foolish and ashamed since 2005
Word Processors like Word or OpenOffice are so 1980ths and should be of no use anymore. They were from a time where the metaphore was a type writer so uneducated untrained computer users could understand it. It never increased productivity. A Latex/CSS system that separates content from display should be todays main model, in it's simplest form this is markdown.
The only thing Latex is good for is mass producing write-once-read-never junk like uni papers. For serious stuff like books and letters you need visual tools, DTP and text processors which could be used by actual people.
@@hakunamatata7922 Yes but the problem is that the text editing component needs to be better then a simple text editor. Not only spell checker but also (very important) outlining functionality. Look at Notabene or Mellel or Scrivener.
@@llothar68 Notabene is pretty much a word processor. Soo is Mallel. But Mallel is mainly for Mac and Apple. Honestly, though, I feel like either Mallel or OpenOffice suits you if you are a editor. It doesn't get any more productive than these in typing and filing. There is one thing that you must keep in mind that makes us stronger in terms of writing and publishing. The BIGGEST issue with productivity of the modern world is that the modern computer is the biggest distraction. It offers the state-of-the-art wordprocessing programs like word and clones such as LiberationWrite and OpenOffice that will surpass the average productivity of a editor of the 1980's. But the biggest problem is that we have more escape holes. We have the internet that is a few clicks away. We could be in the middle of writing and then procrastination sets in. Weeks fly by and the work is finally finished. We say to ourselves "wow. That project too long" when in reality, we were too distracted, and the productions of the project could of taken 2 days instead of 2 weeks. If you keep in mind of the dangers of distractions, and recognize that you are being distracted from your work, you would be able to pull yourself back before the situation grows into a more time consuming issue, thus beating those people who write and complain that they keep finding themselves distracted.
@@robertnussberger2028 I purchased a Mellel license last year. Haven't used it yet as the time for delivering the documentation for my software hasn't come yet. But i will.
Oh yes, the golden age when software wasn't woke, suggesting 'man' be replaced with 'person'. Oh, wait... it did that! Must be the grandaddy of GPT. But seriously, these early word processors seem to have been more advanced than I was expecting. At school I wrote essays on a BBC micro. After about 500 words it word run out of RAM.
***** "us millennials are going to be taking care of you all" Actually no. The SS pool will dry up in the next 15 to 20 years. Especially with all the new "Americans" coming in that never put anything into it wanting to collect welfare and SS. You certainly will not be taken care of when you reach old age.
A word processor that looks for split infinitives.. Now THERE'S a battle that has been thoroughly lost since. Modern English is so ugly and simplistic.
5 років тому+1
Split infinitives make English more complex, not less.
I grew up on an IBM PC in the early 80s going to HS with ~400 students. I was the only one submitting book reports using a word processor. Everyone was so jealous I didn’t have to use a typewriter and had a spellchecker 😂😂😂😂
If Gary Kildall was alive today, he would be awesome UA-camr.
Dude would be too busy enjoying life, flying planes and hitting up biker bars.
Unfortunately he would have been chewed up and spit out by Bill Gates.
Look up the subjunctive form of a verb. Learn to write. Your statement yells at me for help.
@@johanferozco This is why having right word processor is so important!
He'd be saying adorable things like "I remember the days when there were 150 word processors on the market"
One of the things I love about this show is how clever they all are. They stick to the points and don't waste my time. Well, you know what I mean.
Yes, they don’t belabor any points.
Like true professionals.
They deserved an hour-long program. Stuart did a fantastic job keeping everyone moving along and it was a shame he had to keep cutting people off in the middle of interesting discussions because of time constraints.
At least in the 80's. In the 90's and early 2000's this show really went off track though with the bizarre new sets, guests who were mostly just marketing people, and Stuart focusing the coverage to a purely consumer-oriented level.
@@fennecbesixdouze1794 What's that 90s and 2000s you are talking about?
The sound of those keyboards is just wonderful
There are a lot of mechanical keyboards on the market nowadays for people who feel the same way!
Mmm, aslong we don’t get deaf from those mechanicle keyboards,haha lol.
@@ericwood3709 Most mechanical keyboards circa 2014 to 2019, and perhaps beyond, is cheap and tacky and scratchy, and is full of "gamer-centric" bollocks packaged with 500MB software just for macros and lighting configurations.
Give me an IBM Model M please?
@@abzhuofficial Check out Unicomp. They're still making a Model M type of keyboard with the same unique switches and the same basic styling. I have two of them, one a larger design most like the original, and one smaller one. They are available in USB and PS/2, in beige and black, and with different choices of keys (103, 105-key, Sun, PC and Mac). Lots of options, all of decent quality.
@@ericwood3709 I have seen them, and have considered them if I was planning to buy a mechanical keyboard once again. For now though, an OEM chiclet keyboard is serving me really well, surprising enough.
I am hooked on Computer Chronicles. Thanks for the upload.
Look how cool and classy these guys were. Notice how they talk with clarity and intelligence. When one is speaking the others are silent and listening keenly. You hardly see this today.
So nostalgic. I remember discovering this show in the 1980s like it was yesterday. I couldn't wait for each new episode. That was back in the days when computing and computers were fun.
was it just as common to have to spend several months trying to understand how the software works? Modern software is so bloated, it's hard to understand what does the necessary stuff and what just sits there
This channel is outrageously underrated
your comment is outrageously underrated
well this is a niche content. it couldn't get much recognition just bc most people don't really care for these things they talking about
My first wordprocessor was wordstar. Till that time I had no knowledge about word processing. I had heard about line word processors that were just an enhanced version of typewriter. I had often written letters by hand and if I made a mistake I would have to tear the page away and rewrite the whole page from beginning. With wordstar I could do so many things like If I wanted to change the flow of words or change a whole paragraph of text I could just mark a block of text and place it anywhere in the documents. It changed the way I expressed myself in words and a whole new way to letter writing. I could mail merge letters to a group of people instantly. Even with the Dos based application I could do so much. Todays advanced enhanced wordprocessors dont add much to productivity the way wordstar did. I miss those days.
Mine too was WS. Writing term papers became less painful, and mail merge using it and Data Star with a Star Micronix NX-10 dot matrix printer was a breeze.
I still remember the Wordstar keyboard codes on a Heathkit H89 (CPM).
@@RonJohn63 Why would you need to mail-merge a term paper?
@@IkarusKommt “AND” means that I wrote term papers AND used mail merge; it does NOT mean that I used mail merge WHILE writing a term paper.
I learned Wordstar at Control Data Institute during 1987-1988. I liked word processing better than keypunch keyboarding. When it comes to the microcomputer, word processing is my springboard.
I love how they have the nerds instead of slick salesman.
And now, 40 years later, we are at the beginning of the AI revolution where the computers just do the writing for us. Good or bad, that is a hell of a lot of innovation in the span of just my career.
When you look at the costs of these programs , it reminds me how important it is to keep a few computers from the early 1980's on up to today , I get upset when people think of them as old junk and scrap them , the software is out there in thrift shops and I spend most of my income on older softwares as I know just how much it originally cost I am glad there are preservation societies saving the older software and hardware :) QC
:) QC
I'm an old software collector too. It's really amazing when i review software how they had almost all features 30 years ago, but UI is terrible and the resource limits are so visible (High Resolution). And i agree with @Dylan that i miss boxes (especially the old boxed games) and printed manuals and release cycles that were sane. 2-3 years for a new version that was worth buying. Soon all is gone and behind software-as-a-service barriers.
you guys must be LGR fans
@@llothar68 I still have boxed software for my old Amstrad PcW - just in case I ever run across another 8512 again with 3" drives
Old software is getting scarce. You should just buy old floppies and download the software online on an old 20 year old laptop.
I used to tutor introduction to WordPerfect 5 in college. Gotta say I made good money doing it. When you get paid by the hour, having people struggle to remember key combinations is quite profitable.
However, these word processors are a bit before my time. I would have been in 5th grade when this episode ran.
Does anyone else find it ironic dude's name is Jim "Edlin"? (8:20)
I was going to write about that when I saw you did first: the problem is that 99.999999 of the population in present times has no idea what MSDOS command EDLIN was for.
In fact almost no one remembers MSDOS anymore
Never used it much but was useful and tiny.
Dom Xem I am still using it every day.... along with text only Linux. I did not like GUIs in 1985 and still hate them in 2019. Real men dont use mice!
I almost fell off my chair when I saw that! Yes, I'm one of the "old farts"..... Basically started my career in 1983.
Wordstar and Wordperfect are the commonly used word processor software we had in school back in the 80s. By the 90s we were introduced by Microsoft Word. It was an amazing advancement in word processing. It took over the market and dominated it worldwide until this day.
It wasn't popular for very long, but around 1995 I used MS Word for DOS and really liked it.
@@jkeelsncMy understanding is that the reason Microsoft Word does not have Reveal Codes is because of the way it formats it documents. Most word processors use codes to begin and end formatting, just like WordPerfect and Wordstar do.
But with MS Word instead of inserting formatting codes into the document, it applies formatting to the various areas of the document. As an example, if you format a paragraph it applies that format to the entire paragraph. That is why where is no Reveal Codes, there are no codes to reveal although it is possible to see the applied formatting (I think you just have to hover over the text with your mouse but I could be wrong).
Also, many items that are in the document are already there but they won't be seen unless you use them. That is the reason you have to view headers and footers rather than insert them. They are already in the document, but won't appear unless you use them. That is one of the reason that MS Word Documents are so large. As a test I created a one-character document and saved it as plain text, then I saved it as an Rich Text Format (RTF) file, and then as an MS-Word document. In plain text it was 1 byte, in RTF it was 32 bytes (RTF files contains several bytes of formatting data at the beginning of the file), and the MS Word file was 32KB.
I remember writing a text editor back in the day. I used Pascal with in-line 65C02 assembly and it was about 1,000 lines. Word Processors must have been hideously huge.
WordStar 4.0 was written entirely in assembler, IIRC. It was fast and the entire thing fit on one floppy disk.
Have you noticed? How articulate, intelligent and deeply versed in the subject the guests are, I'm in the industry, and sometime I find it hard to absorb when some Tech luminary is explaining his / her concept. Maybe societal changes I guess...
I love the unspoken tension when he throws shade at WordVision.
Learn something new every day!! I had no idea there were some 150 different word processing programs as of 1983. At that time, I only knew of three: Perfect Writer, WordStar and Word Perfect. (Perfect Writer was a program bundled with the Kaypro II computers).
125 out of those 150 would be dead within a few years, selling only a few thousand copies
I was surprised to see Bank Street Writer @ 1:53. That was the first word processor I used in 1985 on a Commodore 64.
There were also a number of free word processors available at the time. One that I used was Galaxy, a Wordstar compatible word processor that was pretty good at the time. Although it had its quirks (you had to separate the paragraphs with a blank line, otherwise it would merge them all together when you reformatted the document), it was a pretty good word processor for the time.
That's really funny that there were word processors in the 1980s that assumed the user understood a handful of really basic grammar terms, just the bare minimum...compared to how that would go over today. Wow. And a stylistic analyzer that identifies sentence types and uses it as a factor to determine reading level. That's impressive. God, there is this whole alternate course of history in which computers continued to develop but GUIs never got introduced and in which Eldin's philosophy of "making computers people-literate" never replaced "making people computer-literate". I want that alternate, text-based past back.
when I was a kid I was obsessed with that Tandy TRS-80 model 100..
what a nice surprise to see and hear Kildall! an genius ahead his time!
I was in college in 83, and the word processor we used was SCRIPSIT. If you forgot just one step, your work disappeared completely. You could save a document to the floppy disk, but if you also forgot to close the file, it was gone forever.
Never thought I’d be nostalgiac for Green CRTs. My kids will never know the hum of a KayPro or a 5150. Sigh.
@MyMomSays I'mCool Unless you buy one.
@no name Do you have this problem in general with bright(er) light sources? If so, you might want to see a doctor about it. There are special glasses you can wear.
@no name Yeah, I too prefer dark backgrounds. I just remembered Alec from the channel Technology Connections. He too wears special glasses because he has eye problems when staring at a screen all day.
There's always emulators. 😁
the smell of the electronics warming up....
That's a phrase you'll never really hear again: Can you please move the Kay Pro... lol
I designed & manufactured a CPU upgrade for the KP that worked at 12 MHz. It fit in the Z80 socket with a 10 MHz Z80 (pushed to 12 MHz) plus 64K of high speed static ram. Sold a total of 3 or 4 of them. ;(
@@DataWaveTaGo that's a shame. I loved my KayPro II in 1985, but CP/M's time had passed.
I also believe that a requirement to be on the Computer Chronicles in the early 1980s was that you had to have a lot of facial hair, or big glasses, and preferably both. Except Stewart Cheifet, who was all covered by a sweet comb over.
A brown suit helps a lot too I think.
@@boredandagitated Yes, the brown suit was required.
People don’t realize how difficult fonts and point sizes were to generate. I remember bit mapped fonts that would fill up a 30 meg hard drive.
Since 2002 after I had my first microcomputer, I discovered printer fonts that were included on a disk with my purchase of my first Canon color laser printer. Also, I bought printer fonts on compact discs. I have a separate disc with downloaded fonts. I loaded the fonts that came from the Canon printer CD and Fonts Deluxe disc in the Fonts folder on to a CD-RW disc. Then I loaded it into my second microcomputer, which is a Dell Inspiron. It came preloaded with Microsoft Windows 10 Home and Microsoft Office 2016 Professional. That is the main reason I care not to upgrade to Microsoft Windows 11. The first reason is that I may not afford to buy hardware. I do believe that generating printer fonts on old monochrome laser printers that had font cartridges may have been difficult to use fonts of different sizes. I missed that operation and probably was promoted to use a color laser printer in 2002, as well as Microsoft Windows XP Professional and Microsoft Office XP Professional. There were some old opportunities that I have likely missed.
Or later the cost of vectored fonts, i.e. Adobe. Bill Gates hated the whole pay per font thing and made it a quest to get Truetype fonts incorporated into Windows as a standard operating system feature.
I miss those huge manuals that used to come with productivity software.
I know. The manuals were actual BOOKS instead of whatever small leaflets we had until recently. Now it's just... Gone.
Does anyone here remember using WORDSTAR in school in 1986 ?
Not in school, but in my home.
I remember using it in school in 1983. When I finally got my own PC clone in 1986, I opted for WordPerfect (version 4.2) instead. I had great fun with WordStar in those early days though.
Sure do!
I learned Wordstar at Control Data Institute in 1988. First, I learned the IBM Displaywriter with TextPak 4, then the Wang OIS, and Wordstar in the IBM PC. I liked word processing better than the keypunch keyboarding done on the key-to-disk data terminal. Word processing reinforces my typewriter-like keyboarding, whereby keypunch defeated the purpose.
Interesting to see the genesis of word processors. First one I used (if memory serves) was WordPerfect in the early ‘90’s or late 80’s. I had a monochromatic monitor but at school it was a blue screen. You had to physically run a spell checker which was a big tech breakthrough at the time. I think it was Msword in the mid to late 90’s that started underlining words in red as you typed - what a revolution! Anyway, still annoyed with word when you just want things placed somewhere or just get rid of that last blank page and it still wont do it.
Hah. My very first word processing software was something called EasyWriter. Then I switch to WordStar because that's what the writing lab was using in college. Later, we switched to WordPerfect, which I hated at first but then grew to love. (I still think that it was the best word processor ever written.) Unfortunately, Microsoft won the marketing game and managed to dethrone WordPerfect. Now, we're all stuck with Word (i.e., Turd).
At that time I was using Wordstar it was a revelation until Wordperfect appears doing magic.
I loved WordStar. Started with 3.3 then moved to 4.0. Prior to that, however, my very first word-processing software was EasyWriter. Good times.
@@byteme0000What do you use now?
@@JamesSmith-ix5jd Word, unfortunately. I don’t like it but what else can one do in the modern business world.
I still think that WordPerfect is the superior word processor, but there are compatibility issues with-you guessed it-Word… and everyone uses Word.
I was just 34 when this aired out! How time flies!!
that would make you about 96 now :P
It's weird how on the internet you can communicate with dead people..
@@planetcoasterprojects3093 and 99 today!!!
how are you?
This persons name is Edlin IBM had a editor called Edlin in 1980 that came on every IBM PC
To boldly split infinitives that nobody has boldly split before.
"You don't need some gigancic 32-bit super micro computer, if all you want to do is simple word processing"
Not only you would want to do some simple word processing, but heavy-duty word processing with such a powerful application to do some advanced tasks such as mail merge, table of contents, index, printing labels, etcetera.
"640K ought to be enough for anybody." - Bill Gates (1981)
3:19 photo of the old man taped to her computer to inspire her
'Computer Chronicles' is an anagram of 'Chronic Computers LE'.
In 1989, I used a word processing program called Xywrite at a typist hired in a graphics shop to learn typesetting. It was a DOS-based program. The only thing I did not like about the job was that it ended in a layoff.
Hello...in 1990, I used Professional Write. Do you remember that one? It was Dos based.
I recall XyWrite but never had to use it or learn it. I remember that it was very popular among hardcore professional writers.
@@byteme0000 As a word processing program, Xywrite had typesetting features added. Thank you for typing to me. Happy Keyboarding!
@@vernonsmith6176I used it at home and it was great word processor. While it wasn't as powerful as the big boys (WordStar and WordPerfect), it was very easy to use. It also had some features that the others didn't have, such as adding file descriptions that would appear when you pulled up a list of documents, the ability to open and save in a large number of formats, and low distractions when came to actually typing (the screen only displayed what was needed, and the typing area took up most of the screen). While it wasn't perfect, it was fine for home use and it likely would have been fine for professional work for many people.
Paul Schindler actually sounded smart in this episode.
but still he comes off so unlikeable. I don't wanna hear him talk just cuz of that.
I remember the Kaypro from back in the day. 👍
Don't know why - computers were exciting then, they felt more scifi than anything we have today
I hope the AT&T guy eventually remembered the word 'analysis' in place of 'analyzation'.
Ooh the memories. I remember "The Computer Chronicles".
I remember Gary Kildall and I had a Radio Shack Model 100! (actually I still have it somewhere around here).
Replace the batteries in it, and it'll probably still work. They were built like tanks.
I am sure it will work. It is in storage somewhere.
'Analyzation' isn't quite as bad as 'utilization', which is a real word--in fact, the most inefficient word in common English: five syllables that can be replaced with three letters.
+Kelli Halliburton
It is OK ...
He hasn't printed the document yet.
Text editors: For coding scary government database software
Word processors: For writing scary government letters to send out to people before Christmas
SHHHH, they'll hear you...! Unironically, the Government really does spy on people... It's quite a pickle, though. How do you keep the people safe without knowing about ANYTHING no one wants you to know?
It's more than reasonable to have the right to privacy, but unless a messianic scumbag uses Windows XP with Internet Explorer, instead of Linux or *BSD, with something like the TOR Browser, it'll be hard to get to them. How do you know when, and if, to cross that line of privacy into intrusion? *Que FBI Door Breaking*
In the early 1980s, Wang dominated the word-processing market. Then Ashton-Tate's MultiMate came along. Printing a document was always a surprise... no WYSIWYG in those days😂😂😂
Unfortunately, sometimes I think that WYSIWYG as it has become was a negative move for word processing. It caused people to spend so much time worrying about how the text would look rather than its content. There was a joke (I think it was Dave Berry who said it) that for every minute you spend actually writing you would spend 10 minutes deciding how it would look.
That's why I prefer to send plain text e-mails and prefer texting over e-mailing. To avoid the issue, I take a kind of document (say a letter) and decide how I'm going to format it and make it a template. From then on I don't spend time formatting the document since it is already done.
One of the most essential software even today.
They even had spellcheck lol.
Wow, they even did it at a level it could reccommend a sexist word replacement and even writing styles.
And these days Word Processors like that don't really exist anymore. That has been replaced by desktop publishing programs with wysiwyg. How times change...
You mean they actually had Paul Schindler in the studio one time???
Now I see why WYSIWYG was such a revolutionary concept!
Were there no better terminals in 1983? That one at the end (dialing in to the Unix system at 1200 baud) has such a dim display, you can't even see the text on the wide shot.
They had a [brightness] and [contrast] control, including the terminal shown. Who knows why it was set a bit dim...
10:23 "People literacy". I like that. What Jim Edlin describes here basically is a very early form of what we call UX or User Experience today. The user sees symbols and colors he already understands and can find those symbols and colors on the keyboard, so his experience using this software should generally be better than with other software where the user has to become "computer literate" in order to use it.
"It will take the computer about 15 sec. . " to check the small document for spelling! Yet at the time it was magic to be able to do that on a personal computer. But was that Oasis system a PC or just a monitor hooked to a mini-computer. But in 1982 and 1983 WANG was the king of word processing. . .until the IBM PC and Apple II killed them.
props to stuart for the savagest comb-over ever
18:33 seems quite ahead of its time feature.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. They identified sexist language as a problem in 1983 already and we still have to deal with the same problem almost 40 years later. Damn.
13:23 I don't recognize Wayne; is he the drummer?
Anyone else think that Word 6.0 -> Word 2016 hasn't really changed much in what people actually use a word processor for? i.e. writing letters
Corporate documents use much more of the added features. Way, way more.
@@DataWaveTaGo So do book writers.
@@DataWaveTaGo People tend to forget that the real customer for Office nowadays is the office worker, the magazine editor, and other professionals. Regular Joe Six-Pack isn't going to use even half the crap that's in Office, but if you work in the corporate world or in publishing, you need what Office (and LibreOffice, to be fair) have to offer.
Of course it changed much. Some of the features that affect anyone: Unicode, vertical cell merging, new image formats, ligatures and stylistic variants...
@@IkarusKommt doesn't make my letter writing any quicker
Wordstar. Wordperfect. MS Word. LibreWriter. The joy of typing docs, records and theses. 😂
ATEX machines were big back then in the press.
Can anyone identify the terminal at 18:18?
Wow, a terminal with smart quotes. Must've been using a custom character set for that.
I also like complicated and expensive the software needed to be due to primitive hardware. A spellchecker that also finds duplicated words, you like totally need a separate $300 package for that!
14:04 KayPro FTW!!!
In 1983 Wang Laboratories owned the word processing world, there;s no mention of Wang here.
Aah, the ebb and flow of beards being in style again...
They can keep the suits, though. 😁
A word processor like wordstar cost $500 back then?
And that was $500 in 1980 with Wordstar. With inflation adjustment, that's nearly $1500 in today's money. Holy crap that was a lot but Wordstar couldn't keep up with the sale demand.
WordPerfect was also pretty expensive back in the day. They later sold a cheaper, cut down version called LetterPerfect.
All software was *very* expensive back then.
Yup. Remember coughing up $500 for Word Perfect 5.1 for DOS. The manual was massive and very nicely bound
The old type writer was best for environmental issues it only needed erasure facility.
The typewriter could have been my springboard since I learned to use its keyboard at 12 years-old.
And to think in just a few short years Microsoft would put 99% of all these word processor makers out of business and drive Gary Kildall to an early death :(
It should be criminal to blame somebody (or a firm) for somebody's tragic death like you did above.
I wonder how many programs over the years he's seen that he thought was just crap.
those poor people bought something that looked like the next big thing, but BAM 2 years later it would be dead, the hardware had improved greatly and better monitors, operating systems and software would make your stuff obsolete, just when you got familiar with it. And that would repeat itself for at least a decade. Today you can work perfectly fine on an old Dual Core or i3 from 10 years ago , running the same software that a 2019 system would use. And MS Word hasn't changed much since 2007
Looks more easy to use than todays word processors
Was it just a coincidence that the first two guests look like the same human or was Gary having a giggle
I like to look at where we were to where we are.
Ah, the days when price actually meant something was better. Generally, anyway. Not like today, where the five dollar item is made in the same factory as the thousand dollar item, it's just that the more expensive one has a brand name label applied to it at the end, then put in a more fancy box.
For Word Processing today all you need is any Raspberry PI + Monitor + Keyboard. So about 100 Dollar or just get some old Laptop and install Linux or Freedos on it. I guess of you could get some trash Keyboard + Monitor and get a Rapi Zero + SD-Card, so maybe as low as 20 Dollar.
Fortunately, I use a Dell desktop computer that I call my "keyboard." It is my main [powerful] typewriter. I use a color laser printer, complete with a scanner and copier, and it prints professional-looking documents. The documents and copies approach typesetting quality. I am home very often and do all of my "professional" printing in the privacy of my home.
Did every guest in the show had to sit lower than the hosts? Paul Schindler looks like he is kneeling.
wow changing language to be more PC in 83
Ｔｈｅ Ｃｏｍｐｕｔｅｒ Ｃｈｒｏｎｉｃｌｅｓ
The computer chronicles😂😂
@18:30
18:57 So they started with that rubbish in 1983?
11:10 da dum tss...
It finds split infinitives and sexist language :)) Haha. I am pretty certain Microsoft Word doesn't have this. I am curious to see.
yet
"Sexist phrases"? I didn't think people were very concerned about that in the 80s. Thought it was more of a 90s and beyond thing.
Even back then, people were forgetting that man was always a gender neutral term.
150 different word processors... my God, the hubris some of these companies had to have thinking they were bringing something original to the market 🤣
Due to the cost of the big programs, some people sought out lower-cost alternatives. I did that a number of times since I didn't want to pay more than $400 for a program to use at home. One of the programs I liked was Professional Write (paid about $60 for it). It was described as the 10-speed of word processors, because sometimes a 10-speed bike can get you to your destination faster than a car.
Even WordPerfect sought out that market by releasing LetterPerfect. It was stripped down version of WordPerfect (they removed some of the features from WordPerfect and it cost about 1/5 the price of WordPerfect) that was compatible with regular WordPerfect (the commands for the features that were there was the same and the document format was the same).
There were also a number of free alternatives. One of the major ones was PC-Write, which had a feature set to compete with the major programs. One that I used was Galaxy, a word processor that produced Wordstar-compatible documents and fit on one 5.25" floppy disc.
It started with a spell check feature, then a grammar check feature and it escallated to ..... AUTOCORRECT. Making people look foolish and ashamed since 2005
haha gw belum lahir, mereka udah bahas word processing
Word Processors like Word or OpenOffice are so 1980ths and should be of no use anymore. They were from a time where the metaphore was a type writer so uneducated untrained computer users could understand it. It never increased productivity. A Latex/CSS system that separates content from display should be todays main model, in it's simplest form this is markdown.
If I were to write a book I still prefer Word. I write all my letters in Word
The only thing Latex is good for is mass producing write-once-read-never junk like uni papers. For serious stuff like books and letters you need visual tools, DTP and text processors which could be used by actual people.
@@hakunamatata7922 Yes but the problem is that the text editing component needs to be better then a simple text editor. Not only spell checker but also (very important) outlining functionality. Look at Notabene or Mellel or Scrivener.
@@llothar68 Notabene is pretty much a word processor. Soo is Mallel. But Mallel is mainly for Mac and Apple.
Honestly, though, I feel like either Mallel or OpenOffice suits you if you are a editor. It doesn't get any more productive than these in typing and filing.
There is one thing that you must keep in mind that makes us stronger in terms of writing and publishing. The BIGGEST issue with productivity of the modern world is that the modern computer is the biggest distraction. It offers the state-of-the-art wordprocessing programs like word and clones such as LiberationWrite and OpenOffice that will surpass the average productivity of a editor of the 1980's. But the biggest problem is that we have more escape holes. We have the internet that is a few clicks away. We could be in the middle of writing and then procrastination sets in. Weeks fly by and the work is finally finished. We say to ourselves "wow. That project too long" when in reality, we were too distracted, and the productions of the project could of taken 2 days instead of 2 weeks.
If you keep in mind of the dangers of distractions, and recognize that you are being distracted from your work, you would be able to pull yourself back before the situation grows into a more time consuming issue, thus beating those people who write and complain that they keep finding themselves distracted.
@@robertnussberger2028 I purchased a Mellel license last year. Haven't used it yet as the time for delivering the documentation for my software hasn't come yet. But i will.
they didn't even mention chatgpt 😁
Holy shit! Glad I was only passing through in the 1980s!!!
WTF!!!!! Word Vision designer is called Jim EDLIN! LOL
Someone copy-pasted the guests 😂
Oh yes, the golden age when software wasn't woke, suggesting 'man' be replaced with 'person'. Oh, wait... it did that! Must be the grandaddy of GPT. But seriously, these early word processors seem to have been more advanced than I was expecting. At school I wrote essays on a BBC micro. After about 500 words it word run out of RAM.
Imagine being so paranoid that you think software is “woke” ❄️
@@andrewahern3730Most software is in fact designed to be woke.
Seek out and destroy sexist phrases!!!
15 seconds for a spelling check back in 83'? Daaaaaang! Also, the beginnings of P.C. Don't say manpower computer!
I can see the utility in gender-neutral office copy. No need to be overtly masculine if you have some women in the office.
Edlin is a bit on the nose as a name
I would pay money to see a millennial college kid trying to churn out their essays using one of these applications. wheeee :)
+Nicholas Von Hieronymus
I like to see people from the 80s do what I did.
I did my papers on a abacus.
+AirScholar , the Sumerians used clay and a reed.
+AirScholar , the Sumerians used clay and a reed.
*****
"us millennials are going to be taking care of you all"
Actually no. The SS pool will dry up in the next 15 to 20 years.
Especially with all the new "Americans" coming in that never put anything into it wanting to collect welfare and SS.
You certainly will not be taken care of when you reach old age.
That name..... XD
I heard of writer's block but writer's aids? Damn.
Not a writer's tool but a writer's AIDS.
A word processor that looks for split infinitives.. Now THERE'S a battle that has been thoroughly lost since. Modern English is so ugly and simplistic.
Split infinitives make English more complex, not less.
Outdated as hell
Matheus Bitencourt
Eerrrmm....It was 35 years ago, of course it is!
boring
I grew up on an IBM PC in the early 80s going to HS with ~400 students. I was the only one submitting book reports using a word processor. Everyone was so jealous I didn’t have to use a typewriter and had a spellchecker 😂😂😂😂
@20:13