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WORD PROCESSOR The original of the original word processors were electric typewriters with a tape recorder that could be edited. It still provided a significant step up from the plain typewriters, though—the parts that were not edited could be left alone while the typist could fix the errors. These first word processors were “page oriented” as opposed to being “document oriented”, which meant that any extra insertion of text into the middle of a page would push the rest of the document down and over that page—which meant, in turn, that the whole rest of the document that followed had to be pushed back…and if that meant more pages, that was the story you had to stick to. You had to transfer all the rest of that document onto more pages. Despite the many troubles this “page oriented” system must have caused, it was found to be helpful in aligning and justifying the letters and lines. This system therefore helped the newspapers keep their print looking neat. There was also a limited amount of changeable fonts that the IBM Selectric printing mechanisms could used (by changing the typing ball) that lent some variety to the look of the typed text. Computer word processor programs came later, and the upgrades with margins and systems that dealt with the document as one long string of text (which would, at printing time, be cut into pages) followed. When typing first was transferred to the monitor screens, the programs tried to mimic the ‘look’ of the typewriter. For some reason people didn’t want to break their connection with having to sit in front of a typewriter and looking at all those gadgets and controlling them to produce a document, instead of adapting the new monitor system that would get rid of that tedious task. Sources: Wikipedia. Word Processor. 12 Oct 2003. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_processor> |
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