Thursday January 25, 2007

Word processing

I was thinking about how Word Processing has changed over the years I have been in the computer industry. My first job in computing had me work for a company that wrote CAD/CAM software. Part of the package was of course documentation. When I joined they printed this off using Diablo printers that used ink tape and golfball print heads I think. Any graphics they had was cut and pasted onto the printout and then I guess photographed and printed. It was very time consuming. I think they used a word processing language on the Prime Computers a bit like Nroff I imagine.

I suppose the next development was the company using Laser printers. These were huge and expensive. I can't remember the company name and I know the company at this point experimented with Tex written by Donald Knuth. The first wysiwyg - what you see is what you get processsor we saw was Interleaf on a Sun 3/50. But for whatever reason we went for a propriety Xerox system which was also wysiwyg and the secretaries also ended up using it. Eventually the system was replaced after I left and I think they might have ended up with Interleaf.

At my second Computer job we had an Apple Laserwriter which was much more compact and of course introduced me to Postscript. Not that I could ever write Postscript but I know Chris can . We had filters on the print server which was running SunOs 4.x which could take ascii and other formats and print them out. As demand grew we went for larger and faster printers at this time I had gone back a step and was using nroff/troff - which I used to like. The company had then standardised on Xios software running on PC's running their own OS. Persistant compatibility document transfer problems between the engineers who by then were using PC's running DOS and using Word Perfect meant the company moved everyone over to Word Perfect including Sun Workstation users who used a version written for Unix.

So to get us up to date I guess Microsoft seem to be dominating things but at Sun we use Staroffice/Openoffice. The great thing about this is its available for many platforms and won't lock you in as Word tries to. The world of WP has certainly come a long way..