WordPerfect: Blast from the Past

This USAToday story on the lawsuit by Novell against Microsoft over Windows 95 support for WordPerfect, or the lack thereof, brings back fond memories:

• Remember WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS?  It was great. 
• Remember macros in 5.1.  A guy whose name I forget made good money by writing a guide on writing macros.  And I got pretty good with them, chaining them together, doing things just for the sake of showing I could do them.
• Remember DOS? It wasn't so great.
• Remember Novell? It bought WordPerfect about the time of the transition to Windows 3.1.  It used to be the system to connect PC's together.

Remember, ah remember, when life was sweet.

Jobs and Proportional Spacing

In his famous commencement speech Steve Jobs took credit for bringing proportional spacing to the personal computer, claiming that Microsoft wouldn't have had the vision to do so.  It's possible his claim was tongue-in-cheek, but Mr. Manjoo at Slate took it seriously in his appraisal of Jobs. " If he hadn’t brought proportional typefaces to the Mac—if the Mac had never existed—it’s difficult to think of anyone else who would have. Microsoft? Dell? No way."

I beg to differ.  Several lines of development came together on the personal computer.  IBM in 1948 announced the IBM Executive Typewriter, which provided a proportionally spaced font.  To the best of my knowledge, such typewriters were always a class symbol, used for "executives". A second line was preparation of copy for photo-offset printing, with the Varityper and later the IBM Selectric Composer.  A third line started with the mainframe with the creation of typesetting.  These separate lines stemmed from the realization that print is just easier to read and prettier to look at if it's proportionally spaced, which then gets you into the details of font design, serifs versus no serifs, etc. etc. It didn't take Steve Jobs for people to realize this.  He didn't create the demand for it from scratch.

My own exposure to the issue came in the early 70's, when we were using IBM mag tape/selectric typewriters for directives. We were looking for replacement systems, which got me looking far afield at the minicomputers of the day.  The monitors on these were limited:; they could form letters with maybe a 6x9 dot matrix.  And their output was limited to the dot matrix or daisy wheel printer.

Another way to discuss this is to focus on the final product, which is "what you see is what you get"--WYSIWYG, both on the monitor and on the output device.  The Executive typewriter, Varityper, Composer all used hardware to provide the output.  WYSIWYG on the monitor required getting enough pixels on the screen to model different type fonts. WYSIWYG on the output device required a device which could vary the output under software control: inkjet, dot-matrix, or laser printers.  And, of course, you needed a software package between the monitor and output device.

What Apple did do by the mid-80's was package the three elements (monitor, software, laser printer) together in a package which could enable desktop publishing.  Once that was in place the doors opened wide and demand rushed in.

More Technology, Less Productivity: Touch Typing

Technology Review has a post noticing that many schools don't teach typing anymore: kids are learning to type on their own, on multiple gadgets and in different ways.

When I had typing class, back in 1957-8, I was possibly the only male in the class, definitely just a handful.  My sister had ordered me to learn to type; she had picked up money by typing college papers for a bunch of males who didn't know how.  Not being the most coordinated of people, I struggled with the class for a good while.  Then finally the drills kicked in, and I was able to pass the 40 wpm test with relative ease.  Later in a work environment, I was able to push my speed even faster.  Though I worked with Ralph Olson, who had started work as a typist for Social Security Administration after WWII, and talked of the high standards they used to have to maintain and how far the current generation (me and the younger people in the office) had fallen away from the standards.

I suppose the need for speed and accuracy in typing is related to the degree to which the typist is serving another's needs and the ability with which errors can be corrected.  So the need for fast touch typists diminishes with the years, just as the need for shoe repairman has diminished. 

When the US Defaulted--Bureaucrats Screwed Up

In a little-known episode, the US has actually defaulted on some Treasury Bills in 1979 due apparently to a perfect storm of events, including maneuvering over the debt ceiling plus bureaucratic problems.  Quoting from Donald Marron's quote of the original article: "on an unanticipated failure of word processing equipment used to prepare check schedules."

That phrase shows how far we've come in 32 years.  I'm curious what sort of word processing equipment they were using at that time--it seems a little late to be using IBM MT/ST's but if they were merging a file of payees with the check boilerplate they would have served.  If they were using more modern equipment, the data storage might have been a problem.  Our Lexitrons used cassettes for storage, the read/write heads would get out of alignment so a cassette recorded on one machine might not work in another.  Interesting also the operation wasn't computerized--after all punch card accounting machines were the way IBM got into computers back in the 1930's.  Maybe they tried to modernize and had some problems. 

Anyhow, bottom line is the US defaulted and a study seems to show it was expensive; the Treasury had to pay higher interest rates for a good period of time.