Then when you process the source with the TeX system, you get gorgeous output.Use Microsoft Word for the best word processing and document creation. You use mark-up when writing. Best 'word processor': a LaTeX system If you want to concentrate in the first instance upon writing and organization, not how things will look, nothing beats a (La)TeX system.
![]() So long as you didn't want, oh say, fonts. 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.It was also the first popular What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) word processor. As well as display a regular selection cursor like any word processor.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.Mix and match the directions and the levels of text to best meet the needs of. But, at the time we were just happy to have any kind of word processing.I'm not the only one who felt that way. 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.As 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. Run photoshop on remote desktop for macIn some cases it was faster to retype the whole document rather than try to edit in the changes. (We were using Redactron dedicated word processors, which used cassette tapes to record the documents. We'd type up the notes (and, often, edit them for grammar and spelling), send them back, then get back marked-up edits, which we'd retype, then these drafts would go to the bosses, who'd mark them up some more - and we'd retype them again. The department advised hospitals on efficiencies one example was a hospital that stacked up all the payment checks it received and deposited them once a week the auditors figured out that the amounts were so large that it would be worth it to them to hire someone to take the checks to the bank each day.This unit would generate lengthy reports for their clients-they told me that the clients didn't believe they were getting their money's worth unless the report was at least 200 pages long.So the two accountants who worked on a project would handwrite their reports on yellow pads and send them to me and another guy who were the typing pool for this unit. Most of us were there in the early days of word processing and are still fond of our first word processors.Some of us, like Mac McCarthy, actually used dedicated word processors before they used word processing software.Mac McCarthy, Publisher of aNewDomain and co-creator of the Dummies books.I worked as a Kelly Girl during the late 70s, at one point for the consulting arm of Ernst & Ernst in Los Angeles. Best Word Processor 2012 Plus Took ThemOur process was to type each page of the document, then take a break while the thing typed a clean copy of that page, which took about a minute. The department, and the idiot boss, needed a consulting firm to come in and do an efficiency report on them!The Redactron was a Selectric connected to a box about three feet high next to our desks we'd type on paper, the box would record what we typed on cassettes, we could correct while typing or go back and make changes (up to a point), then print out a finished, cleaned page. Which of course added at least one time-consuming step, plus took them longer to write, plus they hated handwriting everything. He actually typed with no errors, too, but would let the machine retype a page so he could get a cigarette break. I typed at 110, but 130 was markedly faster. He was such a fast typist that I could not tell, without looking, whether it was him or the automated system typing given page at about 130 wpm. 1978 or so.Points out that: Arguably, many of the programs people are talking about are "text editors" rather than "word processors." E.g., vi, TECO, vs PC-Write, etc.During my year as technical editor at Prime Computers, I wrote (after several others had failed) the manual for their text editor, EDITOR, and word processing macros language, RUNOFF (a variant/descendant of roff, nroff, etc):It was a lot of fun. This was all implemented in 32K of memory. It featured word wrap (hooray!), virtual scrolling through arbitrarily long manuscripts (paging happened invisibly), and even hyphenation & justification. These all ran on DEC's RSX-11D operating system. (The formatting language was Runoff.)A couple of years later my word processor of choice was the one built into the VT-71 smart terminal, talking to a TMS-11 typesetting system. TRIX was a local implementation of SNOBOL, and the AC dialect supplied word processing commands on top of it.When I moved to Digital Equipment Corporation in 1976, a first I used EDT running on RSX-11M, and later on VAX VMS. ![]() I would cast longing glances at the Xerox 860 in the ship's office every now and then.And then I ended up ashore as Zenith 286s started being bought by the boatload, and ended up teaching my new boss how to use WordPerfect 4.0.Of all these old word processors, I should add, as opposed to the text processors like vi, only WordPerfect is still being sold today. I wrote a few letters on that before being told by my XO aboard the Iowa that computers were clerical devices and no officer should be caught dead using one, after which I left it in storage during deployment and went back to the IBM Selectric. When I joined the Navy, I sold my Apple II Plus and bought a KayPro PC that came with WordStar (and a handy keyboard template for the commands, which I promptly lost). But professors did not like getting papers printed on a dot-matrix printer in 1982, so I returned to my primary word processor: an Olivetti electric typewriter and large quantities of white-out.
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