How Literature Became Word Perfect
27th December 2016
In poetic terms, the typewriter means thudding while word processing means deftness. Word processing on one’s own software or computer or special device—on WordPerfect (1980), the Osborne 1 or IBM PC (1981), the Kaypro II (1982), Microsoft Word (1983)—was for many writers special because it is done with light. Andrei Codrescu wrote that the Kaypro “let you write with light on glass, not ink on paper, which was mind-blowing. It felt both godlike and ephemeral.” The word processor is a powerful and empowering tool, far less about dominating the prone typewriter than about feeling humbled in the presence of infinite possibility.
December 27th, 2016 at 10:44
WordPerfect, WordStar, etc. brings back old memories. WordStar was nice for coding, as it had a pretty good ASCII text mode. WordPerfect was the standard until it got surpassed by MSWord. Secretaries liked WordPerfect better than Word because they could see the embedded formatting. MSWord’s strength was in it’s WYSIWYG; you could send copy to different printers and the pages would still look the same. IBM’s DisplayWrite seemed to be the worst of all worlds, with a horrific spell checker that changed words without letting you see them in text. It’s “strength” was that it could produce documents in EBCDIC and therefore be edited in an IBM mainframe. (IBM’s decision making was done with little regard for reality.)
I got chewed out by my boss for sitting at the secretary’s desk and finishing out a report on her Wang terminal. (Wang – so bad that the company replaced it with DisplayWrite.) He said, “If you want to be a typist, I can pay you the secretary’s salary.” I replied, “I’m not typing; I’m composing. There’s a difference.” Within 6 months, we were all issued PCs and the Wang terminals were sent to the scrap heap. Once he started using the PC, he actually came to me and apologized for that comment. (One of those very rare good bosses.)
The only real down side of text software was that it made the position of secretary go away. It used to be that every manager or higher position had at least one secretary, and every department had one or more. I think our little department of a dozen people had 3 secretaries. Now you share one “admin” among 50 people and count yourself lucky if you’re not confined to a cube farm. It’s enough to bring out the Luddite in me.